Access 2006 and xISBN
Last week I was at Access 2006, a conference about libraries and technology, and I had a good time. I met a number of people I’ve only known online and I saw some interesting talks.
Of course, I kept an ear out for mentions of FRBR. Some people talked about it, some people were interested in it, others didn’t know what it was. The most commonly known and used FRBR thing is OCLC’s xISBN. That’s understandable, because it’s the biggest and most useful FRBRish thing out there, even though it’s still in a fairly primitive state. If you give it an ISBN, it will give you back a list of other ISBNs that are manifestations of the same work. Tools like LibX can use that so that when someone is looking at a page that mentions an ISBN they can be shown any other manifestations (editions, in this case) in their local library. For example, if someone’s looking at a Penguin Classics edition of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair at an online bookstore then it’s useful to show them that the Oxford Classics edition is available for free at the library.
xISBN is useful and reliable and it generates answers from an enormous union catalogue. Any other FRBR-related tool that anyone makes, if it’s also useful and reliable and based on a large data set, will soon find itself used in all sorts of ways. Some of them will surprise us. xISBN shows is that any kind of FRBRization helps.
Over the next few days I’ll catch up on what happened while I was away.