The FRBR Blog

OpenOffice is a free, open source set of office applications: a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a slide show/presentation program, etc., designed to be a replace for Microsoft Office. I use it, and it’s very good. I was surprised to see this in a new page about their bibliographic record model on their wiki:

The biographic database is used to store a collection of bibliographic records. Many traditional bibliographic databases contained fields to store information about a limited range of printed works, books, articles, manuscripts etc. An example of this type database is the BibTex which is used with the LaTex word-processing application. Many of the current bibliographic database are derived of that early and pioneering application. As new media types were developed new fields were added to the older databases structures, such as URL’s for web addresses. Also a miscellaneous reference type was added to support all the other types of media now available, video, graphics etc.

… In designing the bibliographic database two models have been useful. [The first is MODS.]

… The second model, described in the ‘Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records’ (PDF version) (FRBR), by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, defined the parts of creative works and relationships between these and their published manifestations; and relationships that people and organizations have with the various components. This model may be to complex to for our needs, however between the two models we should be able to use some of their concepts and design elements to produce a database for our needs.

This could lead to something very interesting. The more people outside the usual library world that see FRBR and make use of it, the better.