Work, expression, manifestation, item … blog.
A weblog following developments around the world in FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.
Maintained by William Denton, Web Librarian at York University. Suggestions and comments welcome at wtd@pobox.com.
Confused? Try What Is FRBR? (2.8 MB PDF) by Barbara Tillett, or Jenn Riley's introduction. For more, see the basic reading list.
Books: FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert Maxwell (ISBN 9780838909508) and Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools edited by Arlene Taylor (ISBN 9781591585091) (read my chapter FRBR and the History of Cataloging).
And now, the best stuff from last month.
I didn’t do a list of the best stuff from September, so here it is. It was a quiet month.
Following up on my mention of Arlene Taylor last week: I noticed on her home page that she has some presentation slides online, including Metadata, FRBR, and New Challenges (1.4 MB PDF) from October 2004. It’s an introduction, so you’ll probably recognize much of it, but she mentions RDF and the Semantic Web at the end. Too bad there’s no video of it available. Perhaps that will become more common in the next couple of years.
Peter Brantley was at an Open Content Alliance conference last week, and in How to Build an Online Library, his comments on the conference, he says, “Ideally, one would create a works level database based on FRBR.”
As discussed earlier, the Perseus Project has this, but it would be very useful if similar sites did too, such as Project Gutenberg. There, for example, there’s no relationship shown between The Adventure of the Dying Detective by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a text file and as an audio file. One work, one expression, two manifestations.
(There is a relationship noted in the audio version, which notes the source and gives the ID number of the story being read. It’s read by a computer, so don’t rush to give it a listen if you can read it instead.)
The Office for Library Standards at Die Deutsche Bibliothek had a FRBR event in July 2004: FRBR Workshop for Expert Group Members (that’s the English version; it’s also available in German).
On July 8 – 9, 2004, Office for Library Standards held a training course for members of the Expert groups constituted by the Committee for Library Standards. With Patrick LeBoeuf, Bibliothèque nationale des France, Dr. Barbara Tillett, Library of Congress, and Ed O’Neill, OCLC, internationally recognized experts could be gained for this workshop. Besides papers, discussions, and working groups for more intensive dealing with topics such as cataloguing, serials, authority files, and MAB2 format the creation and discussion of a German FRBR action plan draft was on the agenda.
There’s a list of PDFs of presentations by Christel Hengel-Dittrich, Patrick Le Boeuf, Ed O’Neill, Karin Schmidgall, and Barbara Tillett.
Hierarchical Catalog Records is a blog entry by Jenn Riley from last Wednesday commenting on the D-Lib paper also named Hierarchical Catalog Records.
I’ve mentioned I believe the FRBRization task is difficult. I don’t believe difficult means impossible in this case, however. We don’t yet have a good sense of the cost associated with such a conversion, so any claim to its value will be tempered by that uncertainty. But I am convinced of that value, and I believe studies like that of the Perseus Digital Library are vital in demonstrating it. No cost can be justified without first understanding the associated benefit. We have a great deal more work to do to reach that understanding.