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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23 April 2007

Blog mentions: A one-act play

Filed under: Blog Mentions — William Denton @ 7:48 am

The curtain rises. Stage right is a large red couch. Stage left is a plain wood desk and a simple wood chair. There is a lamp behind it. A large mirror stands on the floor between the couch and desk.

FRED, a librarian, enters, stage left. He is wearing a black suit. He crosses the stage, stopping to look in the mirror. He adjusts his tie, then turns to the audience.

FRED: Today is the first in a possible series of one-act plays dramatizing blog postings.

FRED goes to the couch and lies down, then turns his head to face the audience.

FRED: Recently Dan Chudnov posted Technical Requirements for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records on his blog.

DAN CHUDNOV enters stage left and stands at the edge of the stage.

DAN CHUDNOV: It’s a real problem that we have a bunch of people ranting about MARC and RDA and what’s cool about FRBR, but we have very little positive direction about what’s needed from descriptive and other cataloging/metadata from a technical perspective to build good systems. There are a lot of people doing cool work with Solr and replacement OPAC demos these days, so maybe we can start to document a set of unit tests or use cases or functional requirements.

DAN CHUDNOV exits.

SALLY, a librarian with a Manitoba accent, is lowered from the flies and slowly descends to centre stage. She turns on the lamp, then sits behind the desk.

SALLY: Anyone interested in FRBR should be on the Resource Description and Access mailing list. There is more FRBR- and FRAD-related traffic there than on the FRBR mailing list, though of course any FRBR person will want to be on that too.

FRED (sitting up and facing SALLY): Recently there have been interesting comments there from Martha Yee, Karen Coyle, and Jonathan Rochkind.

SALLY: Rochkind posted his e-mail on his blog, too: Two Meanings of “Identifier”. It’s a follow-up to Martha Yee’s comments on FRAD.

FRED: Which are available in the list’s archives, and well worth reading.

SALLY (standing and moving to centre stage): A blogger named Nichole posted FRBR of Love a week ago. She uses love as a way of explaining what FRBR is.

FRED: That’s one of the most unusual explanations of FRBR I’ve ever seen.

SALLY: FRBR. Love.

SALLY and FRED hold out their hands to each other, but are too far apart to touch. They do not move. The curtain falls.