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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OpenFRBR Manifesto Number One

Posted by: William Denton, 1 November 2006 7:23 am
Categories: OpenFRBR

OpenFRBR says it will build a complete free implementation of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records).

OpenFRBR says, “Everyone FRBRize everything.”

OpenFRBR says that the entities, the relationships, and the user tasks are all equally important.

OpenFRBR says that both people and machines need good interfaces.

OpenFRBR says it will borrow the algorithms it can and invent the ones it must.

OpenFRBR says it is not an integrated library system. OpenFRBR says, “That which is not FRBR belongs to that which is not OpenFRBR.”

OpenFRBR says it is under the MIT License.

OpenFRBR looks at FRAR (Functional Requirements for Authority Records) and says, “Everyone FRARize everything.” When FRSAR (Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records) is ready, OpenFRBR will look at it and say, “Everyone FRSARize everything.” Everything that OpenFRBR says about FRBR it says about FRAR and FRSAR.

— William Denton <wtd@pobox.com> (1 November 2006)

6 Comments »

  1. “OpenFRBR says that the entities, the relationships, and the user tasks are all equally important.”

    Thank you! Relationships! So important! I hope you don’t just mean relationships between different group 1 entities, but all the relationships.

    Interesting initiative, I hope it is succesful and will be looking for ways to contribute to it and encourage contribution.

    Comment by Jonathan — 1 November 2006 @ 10:33 am

  2. Well this is certainly an interesting development, Bill! And pragmatic. (I especially like the fun part, as I’m always a strong advocate for enjoying the process). Setting aside some of the unanswerables for the moment may just be the ticket to help move things along, too.

    Comment by Mia — 1 November 2006 @ 1:01 pm

  3. It reminded me of the LibDb project. Although this is an interesting approach, frankly, I am not very excited about it and its future. First of all, why Ruby? Either Java or Perl, even Php, there are lots related open sources projects. It is not fun to develop anything from scratch. Secondly, maybe it is about time to think about supporting RDF at very low level. Oh, there are tons of questions. Anyway, it is a good starting point.

    Comment by Jason — 8 November 2006 @ 9:46 am

  4. [...] William Denton announces OpenFRBR, a new Ruby-on-Rails application based on FRBR. This could be quite interesting, bringing the principles of FRBR to Web 2.0. [...]

    Pingback by darcusblog » Blog Archive » OpenFRBR — 28 November 2006 @ 10:16 pm

  5. [...] Source: The FRBR Blog [...]

    Pingback by OpenFRBR « pintiniblog — 9 January 2010 @ 4:35 pm

  6. Hi
    I am PhD student of LIS in Iran. I am working on archival softwares for Iranian archivists.
    I have a question from you.
    Can we use frbr for archival materials? are they defined in frbr?
    It is glad for me for your answers.
    Regards

    Comment by Amir Asnafi — 25 January 2010 @ 9:57 am

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