Work, expression, manifestation, item … blog.
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).
Tim Spalding at LibraryThing introduces thingISBN, an equivalent OCLC’s xISBN. If you give it an ISBN it will return a list of the ISBNs of all of the other manifestations it knows of for the same work. The difference is that where OCLC has smart people making complicated algorithms that run on WorldCat, LibraryThing uses the decisions made by all its users when they group things together into works. Don’t miss Spalding’s blog entry about this.