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

March 2006
M T W T F S S
« Feb   Apr »
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

15 March 2006

Last day for Challenge!

Filed under: 2006 FRBR Challenge — William Denton @ 7:22 am

Entries are flooding in and I now have two! Remember, there are three prizes that will be randomly awarded (look back at earlier posts for the details), so if one more of the 6.5 billion people on the planet enters, he or she will also be guaranteed a prize.

In the meantime, please contemplate the complexity of FRBRizing the four-DVD set of the special edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), directed by Peter Jackson. Here’s a review of it that lists the contents. Included are:

  • The movie itself, split over two DVDs. There are four commentary tracks.
  • Disc 3: Short documentaries and things about preparation for the movie: “J.R.R. Tolkien–Creator of Middle-Earth,” “From Book to Script,” “Storyboards and Pre-Viz: Making Words Into Images,” “Designing Middle-Earth,” “Weta Workshop,” “Costume Design,” “Early Storyboard Sequence: The Prologue,” “Abandoned Storyboard Sequence: Orc Pursuit Into Lothlorien,” “Abandoned Storyboard Sequence: Sarn Gebir Rapids Chase,” “Pre-Viz Animatic: Gandalf Rides to Orthanc,” “Pre-Viz Animatic: The Stairs of Khazad-dum,” “Storyboard to Film Comparison: Nazgul Attack at Bree,” “Pre-Viz to Film Comparison: The Bridge of Khazad-dum,” “Bag End Set Test,” “Middle-Earth Atlas” (an interactive map), “New Zealand as Middle-Earth.”
  • Disc 4: Even more documentaries and things, about the making of the movie and after. I won’t list everything.

How would one specify all the works, expressions, and manifestations involved here? All the relationships? Take an unused storyboard sequence (a storyboard being a series of sketches showing how something will be filmed and how it will look on screen). People took the screenplay and made storyboards, including a sequence about Orcs chasing people into Lothlorien. The sequence is a series of drawings on paper. The drawings were digitized and reproductions of the digitizations stored on DVD. They are on a DVD containing many other related short documentaries and maps and things, and that DVD is one of a set of four in a box. The sequence didn’t make it into the movie, so it’s different from the storyboard sequences that were filmed and used. That’s a lot of different kinds of entities, lots of relationships, and a lot of confusion from looking at a complicated aggregate and not having any rules to follow. I hope the aggregates working group will eventually help with this kind of thing.

A good question for a cataloguing course’s final exam would be to show the contents of a special edition DVD like this and ask students to sketch out as many entities and relationships as they can.