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).

Calendar

February 2006
M T W T F S S
« Jan   Mar »
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728  

2 February 2006

Hickey, Levels of FRBR

Filed under: Blog Mentions, OCLC — William Denton @ 7:12 am

Another day, another link to an OCLC blogger. Thom Hickey posted Levels of FRBR yesterday. He discusses how much energy it takes to implement FRBR and the problem of showing results to users clearly and understandably. These are two key questions.

At the high end you get specialized databases such as AustLit, the Australian literature catalog (which unfortunately you need a log-in to use), where they’ve gone to a lot of work to make sure they know who everyone is and understand the different editions of an author’s work. Just below that there are systems like FictionFinder here at OCLC that work with existing bibliographic information, but do extensive processing of the data to come as close as possible to a real FRBR understanding of the records.