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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Shafranovich, FRBRizing Amazon’s Content

Posted by: William Denton, 26 March 2008 7:45 am
Categories: Blog Mentions,Implementations

Yakov Shafranovich’s Monday blog post FRBRizing Amazon’s Content is very interesting.

About two weeks ago I accidentally stumbled on a third public service that does something similar. When Amazon launched their Kindle eBook reader they made lots of titles available as a Kindle eBook. HOWEVER, they did not want to change the ISBN numbers for these titles. So what they did is re-organize their catalog is a way that all editions of the same work now appear to be linked to together including audio, eBook, hard cover, etc. This ability is buried in their API right here and is called RelatedItems:

He’s put up bookchaser.com, a tool to compare the results from Amazon, thingISBN, and xISBN.. Compare Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (starting with the ISBN of a Canadian manifestation): 81 results at xISBN, 105 at thingISBN, and 23 at Amazon, or, as Shafranovich calls his application, amazingISBN. On the other hand, here’s a book where Amazon knows more than the other two services.