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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FRBR in WoGroFuBiCo webcast

Posted by: William Denton, 27 November 2007 7:08 am
Categories: Library of Congress

It’s taken a while to recover from the wild excitement of the week before last, what with the RDA announcement and the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. The draft of their report will be out later this week and I’ll definitely link to it, but so will practically every other library blog in existence, so don’t worry that it’s going to sneak by you.

I listened to the WoGroFuBiCo webcast and it was fascinating. Excellent stuff, quickly and efficiently told. I look forward to the report, but I recommend the webcast to you too. If you have access to a Unix/Linux command line, you can convert the RealVideo stream to an MP3 with these commands:

mplayer rtsp://rmserv1.loc.gov/avloc04/071113lis1330.rm -ao pcm:file=wogrofubico.wav
lame -b 32 wogrofubico.wav wogrofubico.mp3

That’s what I did, and at the 61 minute mark I heard the summary of recommendation 4.2, about FRBR: “Immediately … develop a comprehensive test plan for FRBR…. Until these tests are completed and until the results have been analyzed, we recommend that the Joint Steering Committee temporarily suspend further new work on the development of RDA.” The full explanation is longer, of course, but instead of transcribing it we can wait a few days to read the whole thing in the report.

Around 74 minutes Barbara Tillett, who works at the Library of Congress and is one of the people working on RDA, comments that a lot of what was recommended the Library of Congress is already doing. She doesn’t mention the recent change in approach at RDA, but her question and the responses are very interesting listening.

Exciting times in cataloguing!


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