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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8 September 2007

ngc4lib: Jenn Riley comment

Filed under: Blog Mentions — William Denton @ 7:10 am

I point out something in the ngc4lib mailing list (”next generation catalogs for libraries”) archives every now and then. You might want to join the list. Thursday Jenn Riley, a music librarian, sent a comment in response to Jim Weinheimer:

I think it’s important to remember that FRBR is a *conceptual* model. The entities in FRBR don’t necessarily have to be “records” in a catalog the same way we have records today, individual screens or tabs a cataloger has to interact with. It’s certainly simple from a system point of view to make records that match FRBR entities, but even if we do this, it doesn’t mean that a cataloger has to manually create or even *see* each of these records. It could all be handled from a simple screen indicating formats, or even just generating format information from files on a file system. We need good (or even reasonable?) UI design for cataloging interfaces, even more now than ever before. The cataloging interface does *not* have to mirror the underlying database structure. Ditto the end-user interface.

If you follow the link in the Subject line you can see the whole thread, which is about a digitized version of Cutter’s Rules (which I couldn’t see in Google Books but could see here).

Vive Cutter! Vive Ranganathan! Vive Lubetzky!