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).

Calendar

May 2007
M T W T F S S
« Apr   Jun »
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  

3 May 2007

Pride and Prejudice 3: MARC

Filed under: Pride and Prejudice — William Denton @ 7:38 am

Yesterday I superduped Pride and Prejudice and got 792 ISBNs, representing manifestations of that book in English and other languages, and some other books, mostly two other Jane Austen works. The day before that, I showed how to use an ISBN to get a free MARC record.

Today, as we slowly amble along this FRBRization experiment, I combined the two and created a file with MARC records for 383 of those manifestations. Why only 383? The other 409 couldn’t be found on the open Z39.50 servers I queried. That’s annoying — this information should be freely available to all — but 383 is enough for what we’re going to do.

It’s not 383 perfectly clean MARC records, either. MARC/Perl comes with a handy script called marclint, which will report errors in a MARC file. (Sadly, there’s no marctidy, which would clean up the errors!)

 Recs  Errs Filename
----- ----- --------
  383   249 pride-and-prejudice.marc

Some of those errors will be so heinously egregious that we’ll need to get rid of them, but we’ll see about that when we get there.