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).

Calendar

May 2008
M T W T F S S
« Apr   Jun »
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  

xOCLCNUM

Posted by: William Denton, 24 May 2008 7:27 am
Categories: Implementations,OCLC

Earlier this week OCLC announced xOCLCNUM, which is like xISBN except that instead of giving it an ISBN and getting back related ISBNs, you give it an OCLC number and get back related OCLC numbers.

Timothy McCormick included this in his e-mail to the code4lib mailing list about it: “ISBNs have been assigned since 1970, to most but not all books published. OCLC numbers are assigned whenever a record is added to WorldCat, OCLC’s global union catalog. These records cover a large portion of all books, old and new, held by any library in North America and, increasingly other regions worldwide (most recently, National Library of China: see http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/20085.htm). So the coverage range of OCLC numbers is, not surprisingly, far greater than that of ISBNs: in WorldCat, for example, around 100 million OCLCnums compared to about 20 million ISBNs.”

Very useful.