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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www.libraryresearch.com

Posted by: William Denton, 13 January 2006 7:25 am
Categories: Papers

I learned recently (I can’t remember who told me) that EBSCO has made their Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts database free for searching at www.librarysearch.com. Those of you with access to a large or specialized library probably already have it and much more, but for the rest, it’s a great resource. The URLs are incredibly ugly, and I won’t link directly to a search, but if you search for “frbr” then you get a list of 78 (as of today) FRBR-related papers.

The most recent is “The FRBR Model as Applied to Continuing Resources” by Ed Jones (Library Resources & Technical Services, 49 (4), October 2005), which I mentioned last month. Sorting results by date doesn’t work (!?) but the earliest I saw is “Multiple Versions Revisited”, by Edgar A. Jones (Serials Librarian, 32 (1/2), 1997). The abstract says, “Re-examines the multiple-versions problem in serials cataloging, with reference to the IFLA draft Functional Requirement of Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model.” Same fellow, I assume!

If you don’t have easy access to these journals, you’ll have to ask your local library to get a copy of an article through interlibrary loan or try to cadge a PDF from someone (preferably at a university). The database will be very useful, at least, for seeing who’s publishing what and what they’re talking about. It’s hard to stay connected when you don’t have access to where people are writing, and a lot of FRBR work is in expensive journals. Luckily, as you can see in the archives, some writers make free copies available, which is a boon to everyone. And much other interesting work and comment is on web sites, blogs, and mailing lists all over.

(Note: I denied all cookies that the site wanted to lay on me and everything still worked.)