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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OpenLibrary gets into FRBR

Posted by: William Denton, 19 August 2008 7:16 am
Categories: Open Library

Karen Coyle sent a message to an Open Library mailing list on Sunday: Work and Edition Fields.

In beginning our journey into “frbrization”, I have gone over the list of fields in the OL record and have separated them in terms of Work and Edition. http://openlibrary.org/about/work_edition. Comments welcome. Note that we haven’t yet grappled with “expression” in terms of FRBR, but I’m not sure that we’ll be able to have a separate level for expressions since we may not get the data that we need to make that distinction. I suspect that some expressions will get treated as editions (manifestions, in FRBR-speak) and others will be treated as Works. For example, we probably will not have a way to know when a book is a translation of another book. That would be an expression in FRBR, but it may be treated as a Work in OL until we find some way to bring together the translations for a work.