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 May 2007

Pride and Prejudice 2

Filed under: Pride and Prejudice — William Denton @ 7:14 am

I have in my collection an item that is an exemplar of an Oxford World’s Classics manifestation of their customized expression of Jane Austen’s work Pride and Prejudice. The note on the text (that is, the expression) says, “The present text is substantially that of R.W. Chapman’s edition (Oxford, 1923; revised by Mary Lascelles, 1965), based on the first edition collated with the second and third. Chapman’s textual apparatus has been revised and his emendations reconsidered.” I love sentences like that.

The manifestation seems to be the seventh impression of the first Oxford World’s Classics edition from 1998. The ISBN is 0192833553.

If we query thingISBN for 0192833553 we get back 254 ISBNs. If we query xISBN for 0192833553 we get 353 ISBNs. That’s a lot of ISBNs.

Superduping them goes along fairly normally for a while, picking up a lot of English manifestations (you can imagine how many of those there are, and this isn’t even counting the pre-ISBN editions) and many in other languages (my apologies for any character set problems): Orgoglio e Pregiudizio (Italian), Ylpeys ja Ennakkoluulo (Finnish), GhuÌbar aur Tasub (Urdu), Northanger Abbey (English), Stolz und Vorurteil (German), Duma i Uprzedzenie (Polish) …

Wait, Northanger Abbey? How did that get in there? I’m not sure. There are a lot of ISBNs going by and I didn’t narrow them all down. I did see thingISBN return a cluster of 44 ISBNs for 0140090029, The Penguin Complete Novels of Jane Austen, which xISBN grouped with Pride and Prejudice. That got us into a whole set of numbers for omnibus editions of Austen’s novels. Later a lot of Sense and Sensibility showed up.

The final superduping tally was:

Combining and deduping: 464
Superduping: 792 ISBNs
thingISBN: 254 at start; 367 calls; 199 ISBNs added; 350 unknown
    xISBN: 353 at start; 175 calls; 312 ISBNs added; 127 unknown

Had I wanted to stay just with Pride and Prejudice I would have probably been better off staying with the combined and deduped results, and not gone ahead and superduped them. However, having all those extra ISBNs makes the next steps more fun!

So now I have 792 ISBNs in hand. Next, I get MARC records for as many as possible.