The FRBR Blog

People all over the world are packing their suitcases and keeping a close eye on their passports and plane tickets: next week the 73rd IFLA General Conference and Council starts in Durban, South Africa. It runs from 19 – 23 August.

IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, is where FRBR was born. The FRBR Review Group will be meeting there, as will I believe the Working Group on FRAD and the Working Group on FRSAR.

If you have a look at the conference program, you’ll see that this Sunday, from 1:45 to 3:45 PM, under “Update on International Issues and Report on Bibliographic Control in Southern Africa,” Glenn Patton will be talking about FRAD and Marcia Zeng and Maja Žumer are talking about FRSAR, with Barbara Tillett giving the introduction.

I’ll be keeping an eye peeled for any news from the conference and will post here anything of interest. Drop me a note, or leave a comment, if you’re there and come across something we all should know. Next year the conference is in Quebec City, and I plan on going.

I hope everyone going has a good and productive time there.

Over at the Open Library project, Karen Coyle posted a link to a record-merging algorithm. On the mailing list where she announced this, she said, “This algorithm was designed to bring together what you would call ‘manifestations’ in FRBR-speak, and what OpenLibrary calls an edition. It can basically be summed up as ‘things you would assign the same ISBN to.’”

It may be temporary on her site (the URL implies so), but if this builds into something permanent at the Open Library then it will be very useful. Certainly the algorithm is of immediate interest to anyone grouping MARC or ONIX records.

Kristin Antelman gets mentioned here every now and then (search for her name) because she writes and talks about FRBR. In June she was in Michigan and spoke about next generation catalogues, including a brief mention of FRBR.

As a case in point, Kristin asks the question: “What is an identifier?” Librarians have one idea of what it is: a title and an author string. But to web programmers, this is a hopelessly unreliable means of identifying unique objects – in a networked environment you really need some sort of URI.

That’s getting FRADdy!

In FRBR and Spimes (posted on his blog at the end of June), Bradley Allen says “it dawned on me that FRBR is a terrific framework for thinking about spime management.” A spime is “a currently-theoretical object that can be tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of the object” (according to Wikipedia). Hmm!

The “Burroughs project” is his William S. Burroughs collection.

Lars Aronsson sent an interesting e-mail to the ol-lib mailing list the other day. That’s where people talk about the librarianship aspects of Open Library.

Deadlock outlines a crazy chain of translations and adaptations of Sara Paretsky’s novel Deadlock. Things like that are good fun to consider in a FRBR way. “So this is an expression of that, and this is a whole new work, with these people and these corporate bodies involved …”

Here’s LibraryThing’s work information page for
The Nature of “A Work”: Implications for the Organization of Knowledge, by Richard P. Smiraglia. Notice how various manifestations of the single expression (the final edited text) of this work have been grouped together.

In June Timothy Dickey, a student at Kent State’s School of Library and Information Science, won the 2007 LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award for his paper “FRBRization of a Library Catalog: Better Collocation of Records, Leading to Enhanced Search, Retrieval, and Display.” I just found out about it yesterday!

[The paper] examines the challenges and benefits of reorganizing an Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) to take advantage of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, known as FRBR. He describes the potential of FRBR to provide a mechanism that improves the ability of OPACs to better address the relationships among materials formats in genres such as music. He also describes the current landscape where FRBR largely remains a theory since there are few working applications except from a small number of vendors.

It’ll be published in Information Technology and Libraries and I’ll post a link to it then.