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

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21 July 2006

Not many posts over July and August

Filed under: Administration — William Denton @ 7:02 am

Thermodynamics tells us that when heat is added to something, its atoms gain energy, they become more excited, and they began to jiggle around more. When heat is added to me, however, I lose energy, become less excited, and move less. It’s summertime in Toronto, it’s hot, and I’ll be posting infrequently. If I see anything of interest around the web I’ll point it out, and another example and, at last, the wrap-up of the 2006 FRBR Challenge will come soon.

For more on heat and jiggling I highly recommend listening to (or reading) the first of
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, “Atoms in Motion,” which is one of the greatest lectures I’ve ever heard. All the lectures are incredible. FRBR comes into play with the lectures, of course. They were recorded, and the recordings were made available on cassette and CD. The were transcribed, and have been published in hardcover and paperback in multiple volumes, and this year The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition was put out. Different groups of lectures have been collected in smaller books and audio sets. The lectures were given over two years. They are a work as a whole; each year is a course, and also a work; each lecture is a work, and it has different expressions (audio, written) which appear in many different manifestations. Mapping out all the relationships would take a while, even if one ignored the translations into other languages.


19 July 2006

RDA Online

Filed under: RDA — William Denton @ 7:14 am

RDA Online was announced on 2 July but I’m just getting around to posting about it. It’s a demo (a screencast) of how an online version of Resource Description and Access might look. I only watched half of a demo. There was nothing too exciting; it’s about what you’d expect when an enormous set of detailed rules is put online, with hyperlinked cross-references and so on.

What would be great is if access to this is free, but I assume it’ll cost money.


17 July 2006

Binkley and Lav

Filed under: Blog Mentions — William Denton @ 7:07 am

Here’s a bit from a blog posting by Peter Binkley from 2 March 2006, Holdings for All, written after an IRC exchange with Aaron Lav:

Aaron is after something similar, to have a Book Burro-like function that makes use of xISBN to look for other editions, and a FRBRish display that makes it easy to see how the various editions differ (if, for example, you start with the ISBN for the 1995 edition, the display makes it easy to see that the library has the 1980 edition at a different call number).

Binkley gives a few thoughts about how the implementation could be done.


9 July 2006

WordPress 2.0

Filed under: Administration — William Denton @ 7:59 pm

I’ve upgraded WordPress (the blogging software I use) to the latest version. Everything seems to be tickety-boo, but if you have any problems, please let me know. You shouldn’t notice any changes at all.


6 July 2006

No posts this week

Filed under: Administration — William Denton @ 12:01 am

There will be no posts this week. Stay calm. Be brave. Wait for the signs.