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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25 January 2008

Four FRBR questions: Arlene Taylor

Filed under: Four Questions — William Denton @ 7:05 am

Three days ago, Shawne Miksa answered the Four FRBR Questions, and today I’m delighted that Arlene Taylor, editor of Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools, joins the pantheon.

Arlene Taylor is professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh. Before moving to the library school there she taught at U Chicago and Columbia; the lengthy CV on her web site lists all her previous work, starting as a librarian in a junior high school. A more personal introduction to her career is in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly (32: 3): A Tribute to Arlene Taylor (2001) . I used her books The Organization of Information and [Wynar’s] Introduction to Cataloging and Classification to get through my cataloguing courses in library school.

When did you first hear about FRBR?

I have been friends with Barbara Tillett for many years. I first heard about FRBR from her while she was working as a consultant to the study group.

What’s your involvement with it now?

I try to keep up with what is going on. I have been asked to speak about FRBR to various groups (e.g., the Missouri Library Association), and to LIS graduate school cataloging classes. I attended the FRBR workshop at OCLC 2005. I attended the meeting of the FRBR Implementers group at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia (January 2008). I edited a book on FRBR that was published by Libraries Unlimited in November 2007, which includes my chapter attempting to explain FRBR in understandable terms.

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

I think that there is a huge need for all librarians and other organizers of information to become educated about FRBR and about how much it could help users better find much of what they are looking for. Getting the FRBR model implemented into library systems, and better yet, implemented on the Web, is going to be dependent upon the persistence of those of us who understand the importance of organizing information. We have to convince system designers of the superior value of this model in showing relationships among entities being sought by users.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

FRBR is a way of explaining the relationships between and among works, authors, and concepts in the bibliographic universe. And the bibliographic universe, if you were wondering, encompasses all instances of recorded information. (A student once wrote on an exam that the bibliographic universe is where Professor Taylor lives.)

Previously in the series: