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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3 April 2006

Summit feasability report

Filed under: Implementations — William Denton @ 7:17 am

Summit is “a library catalog that combines information from Pacific Northwest academic libraries into a single unified database.” Those libraries are in the Orbis Cascade Alliance, and on 15 March the Summit Catalog Committee Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) Working Group issued Report on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records For the Summit Catalog (381 KB PDF). Their job was to see how FRBR would affect them.

At the 2005 Innovative User Group Meeting, Claudia Conrad from Innovative Interfaces presented a session titled: Functional Requirements for bibliographic records: FRBR and Millennium. At this session she used the following slides to illustrate Innovative’s concept of a Millennium FRBR-based catalog…. [A]ccording to an Innovative sales representative, the company has decided to postpone further FRBR product development. It was reported to the working group that Innovative has halted development of a FRBR product until after 2008 when the RDA standards are completed.

… OCLC is currently researching the possibilities of providing a FRBR service and looking for pilot beta sites. OCLC envisions a record service that allows a library to load FRBR work records to a local catalog so that local system may use them for displaying in their OPAC.

… [FRBR] has not been as readily adaptable to the description of serials, series, and integrating resources. Finally, speculation persists that some FRBR attributes may be overspecialized and difficult to implement in cataloging rules revision and systems design because of the model’s inherent privileging of traditional, print-based modes of communication.

They end by recommending seeing if they can do a pilot project with OCLC, and generally keeping an eye on things. The report is worth reading, for the Innovative screenshots, for their list of problems with FRBR, and as an example of what libraries are thinking: “FRBR is still a concept at this time.”

If your library does something similar, let me know and I’ll mention it here. It’s good to share this.