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).

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19 December 2005

Weinberger on unique IDs

Filed under: Blog Mentions — William Denton @ 7:15 am

David Weinberger’s The Year of Unique IDs talks about ISBNs and FRBR and unique identifiers. (The title says it’s from 21 March 2000, the top of the page says it’s from 5 December 2004, but I think the date in the URL wins and it’s from 5 December 2005.)

There are a number of approaches to identifying when two books are in some sense the same. One is OCLC’s xISBN. “Key in an ISBN for Hamlet,” says Tom Hickey, “and you’ll get a long list.” The list is compiled in part by hand by people working with OCLC’s WorldCat, an online catalog of books and other stuff in libraries. Some of the clustering is done algorithmically and it’s harder than one might think. “There are lots of different titles of Hamlet,” Tom points out: “Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Tragedy the Prince of Denmark,” etc. The algorithmic clustering is abetted by humans. Tom says that they’d like to expand the clusters so that if you search for Hamlet you’d get back The Collected Works of Shakespeare, the audio versions, and the various movie versions, but that’s some ways off. Likewise, he’d like to expand beyond books to magazines and journals. The system is free for now and the foreseeable future.

ISBNs were designed for print books. Now there are Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) that “fall under the purview” of R.R. Bowker, says Carol Cooper. A DOI is designed to function as a clickable hyperlink that takes you to the publisher’s choice of pages — perhaps an order page, a page listing various available versions, or a digital frights page. (A “digital fright page” is a page that warns you against using content in ways you used to think were legitimate. I just made it up.) The International DOI Foundation provides the blocks of numbers and also the resolution service so that when someone clicks on one of them, users are taken to the right page….

Talis, a UK provider of library systems for thirty years, has a related offering. They recently launched SkyWalk, an attempt to map various library classification schemes so that users can ask “Do you have a copy of Hamlet?” without having to booleanly specify “OR Shakespeare’s Tragedy of the Prince of Denmark OR Hamlet, Prince of Denmark OR Hamlette: Shakespeare Misspelled?” Paul Miller, the Talis technology evangelist, says that SkyWalk uses xISBN to help with the mapping. It is a free service.