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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Pride and Prejudice 8: Comments

Posted by: William Denton, 18 May 2007 7:41 am
Categories: Pride and Prejudice

This isn’t the end of the Pride and Prejudice experiment, so stay tuned. Today, a break for some comments. Coming up over the next few days are some pre-loaded posts so that I don’t have to work over the Victoria Day weekend.

  • What do you make of the FRBRized Pride and Prejudice results? The blanks at the start come from the non-English records that I obliterated, I think. Some non-Roman characters got wiped out, too, such as in Chinese and Swedish titles. For some manifestations the language is known, for others not. Sense and Sensibility got into the mix, as discussed earlier. LC’s algorithm did a pretty good job with the manifestations of the standard English expressions of the works, but translations, collections, and critical editions didn’t come out quite as well.
  • And what do you make of the FRBRized Harry Potter series?
  • There are a lot of ugly MARC records out there.
  • I don’t know a thing about character encodings in MARC records but I’m going to need to learn.
  • The world needs a good web-based MARC editor. I would like to be able to upload a file containing multiple MARC records and have a nice Web 2.0 tool parse them all and let me edit them, delete them, or add new ones, and then export a fresh new MARC file. This would be far easier than me grunting through scripts full of ugly late-night hacks. If you’re looking for a good web-based, Ajaxy project with some Ruby, Python, or Perl on the back end, consider making the world’s first free web-based MARC editor. (Those of you who can run Terry Reese’s MarcEdit may not feel the same need.)
  • The Library of Congress’s FRBR Display Tool needs to be robustified so it can withstand heinous MARC records, but it’s still a fine piece of work. My thanks to the Library of Congress for creating it and making it available!
  • The Java part of the LC’s FRBRization process can be replaced and the same XSL used. More on that next week.
  • There’s OCLC’s FRBR Work-Set Algorithm to consider. How do they compare?
  • How can they work together? How would results from one complement, support, and improve the other’s?

I plan to load the FRBRized Pride and Prejudice and Harry Potter data into OpenFRBR. When that happens, I’ll post more. I think it will be a very interesting step. In the meantime, all comments are welcome about the experiment so far, the FRBR Display Tool, the results, etc. Leave a note here, or on your own blog with a trackback.