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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2 November 2006

Minutes from August IFLA meetings

Filed under: Aggregates, Conferences, IFLA — William Denton @ 7:05 am

Pat Riva, chair of the group, sent along a pointer to updates to the list of meeting and activity reports of the FRBR Review Group. Two sets of minutes from the August meetings in Seoul are now up.

First, there’s the FRBR Review Group Meeting Report, 20 August 2006 (162 KB PDF). I strongly agree with this quote; this same thinking is what led me to OpenFRBR:

Discussion focused on the recommendation that the RG should give more priority to advocacy, specifically developing evidence-based arguments that demonstrate the value of FRBR. This recommendation stems from the observation that vendors have a perception that FRBR implementation is costly, and that purchasers of systems are not sufficiently aware of the benefits of FRBR for end users to request it. Demonstration projects have great potential in demonstrating value concretely.

The other new report is Working Group on Aggregates Meeting Report, 20 August 2006 (174 KB PDF). Aggregates are tricky, and that’s why there’s a special group looking into them.

The discussion centered on a debate describing two distinct models for aggregates (independently created works published together).

Examples: Audio CD, Web sites, Conference proceedings, Anthologies of poetry and/or prose literature, Song/music books, Trilogies, Conference proceedings, Serials (collections that are intended to be together), Monographic series (collections that are intended to be together)

Model 1: The whole is a manifestation that functions as the glue that holds a set of works together.

Model 2: The whole is a work in and of itself: a “work-of-works.”

Proposed activity: The group will collect examples of aggregates, whose relationships will be described using each of the two models under review.

This is important work and I look forward to the results. I’ll have to think over some examples and see which model works best. It’s a knotty issue.