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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13 September 2006

A Tool for Converting from MARC to FRBR

Filed under: Implementations, MARC, Papers — William Denton @ 7:33 am

Trond Aalberg, Frank Berg Haugen, and Ole Husby have a paper up (behind a pay-wall, sadly): A Tool for Converting from MARC to FRBR.

Abstract: The FRBR model is by many considered to be an important contribution to the next generation of bibliographic catalogues, but a major challenge for the library community is how to use this model on already existing MARC-based bibliographic catalogues. This problem requires a solution for the interpretation and conversion of MARC records, and a tool for this kind of conversion is developed as a part of the Norwegian BIBSYS FRBR project. The tool is based on a systematic approach to the interpretation and conversion process and is designed to be adaptable to the rules applied in different catalogues.

There’s more on this undated page also called A Tool for Converting from MARC to FRBR, by Aalberg solo. It links to a page written in Norwegian and containing a Java applet. Since I can’t read Norwegian and haven’t managed to get Firefox to run Java, I have no clue what’s going on there. I don’t have access to the paper, either, so I’m pretty much in the dark about all of this. If I find out more, I’ll post about it. If you’ve read the paper, feel free to leave a comment and clue me in. Just so you don’t go away completely unfulfilled, here’s a link to BIBSYS, “a leading supplier in Norway of information systems to libraries and institutions of higher education.”

UPDATE: I’ve read the paper. Here’s how they’re doing it:

The process outlined above is implemented in our conversion tool by the use of XSLT — the W3C language for transforming XML. Each entity case is coded as a template following the same control structure, and XPATH expressions are used for the various conditions and selections that need to be applied. The tool reads MARC-records encoded in the MarcXchange XML-format and produces a record for each entity in a format that extends the MarcXchange with FRBR type attributes and a relationship element.

They’re going to publish how they do the work, which will be great, but there are no algorithms or examples in this paper. They use the Library of Congress’s work on MARC and FRBR and cite OCLC’s Work-Set Algorithm.

An interesting development in mass FRBRization. I look forward learning more about it.