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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LibDB revivified!

Posted by: William Denton, 8 March 2007 7:47 am
Categories: Implementations

Andrew Hankinson sent a message to web4lib last week saying that he’s reviving Morbus Iff’s LibDB project. I’m a bit slow on things and am seven days late passing it on:

As a project for one of my courses, I have decided to update the Drupal module LibDB to attempt to come up with a fully-functioning FRBR digital library implementation. Obviously this is a very large job, but it is one that I feel I can commit to over the long term (and not just the duration of the course.)

As of right now, I’ve gotten it working (mostly) on Drupal 5, and have been working on a database model that would fully implement the FRBR ’standard’ as outlined by the original IFLA document. LibDB was abandoned (or at least put on the back burner) by its original creator, and much of it is left to do.

I have a fairly good knowledge of the internals of Drupal, but lack a good sense of programming practices. (I could do it, but it would a) be a slow process and b) be inefficient and sloppy code.) If you’re interested in getting involved in this, feel free to reply to me (on or off-list) and I will start putting things together.

This is great news. Good luck to Hankinson! My own OpenFRBR project got off to a lacklustre start but I’ll be getting back to it shortly, fortified by the new edition of Agile Web Development with Rails by Thomas and Hansson.