The FRBR Blog

Beyond the OPAC: Future Directions for Web-Based Catalogues was a conference given in Australia on 18 September 2006. The texts of the papers, the presentation slides, and audio recordings of the talks are all available online! I haven’t listened to them yet, but you’ll certainly want to investigate Martha Yee’s talks and, if you want to go further, anything about RDA.

• Beyond the OPAC: Future Directions for Web-Based Catalogues (Martha Yee)
• The Well Connected Catalogue (Patricia Scott, Denise Tobin, Helen Attar)
• Setting a New Standard: Resource Description and Access (RDA) (Deirdre Kiorgaard )
• The Potential Impact of RDA on OPAC Displays (Ann Huthwaite, Philip Hider)
• OPACs and the Real Information Marketplace: Why Providing a Mediocre Product at a High Price No Longer Works (Lloyd Sokvitne)
• Seeding Search Engines with Data from the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD) (Tony Boston)
• Applying FRBR to Library Catalogues: A Review of Existing FRBRization Projects (Martha Yee)
• Managing OPACs: Approaches to the Process of OPAC Change and Development (panel discussion)

Congratulations to the National Library of Australia for making all this available. (Seen on Catalogablog.)

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.

It’ll be slow here this week and next, but look for an announcement about OpenFRBR soon thereafter.

Arlene Taylor, professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, is editing a book about FRBR. It’s called Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools, and it’ll be out in spring 2007 from Libraries Unlimited. It looks like it’ll be a good one and if you follow this blog you’ll want to read it. Here’s a list of who’s contributing chapters:

• Basic explanation of FRBR – Arlene Taylor
• Basic explanation of FRAR – Arlene Taylor
• FRBR as continuum since Panizzi – William Denton
• Research on FRBR and some FRBR projects – Ed O’Neill
• Interaction of FRAR and FRBR – Glenn Patton
• FRBR and RDA – Barbara Tillett
• FRBR and music – Sherry Vellucci
• FRBR and art works – Murtha Baca and Sherman Clarke
• FRBR and serials/continuing resources – Steve Shadle
• FRBR and moving image materials – Martha Yee
• FRBR and cartographic materials – Mary Larsgaard
• FRBR and archival materials – Alex Thurman
• FRBR and bibliographic families / superwork idea – Richard Smiraglia

That’s me doing the third one, about FRBR and the history of cataloguing. I’m delighted to have a chapter in the book and to be in such company. I’ll post more about the book as the release date gets nearer.