The FRBR Blog

Ed Summers posted SemanticProxy and used a recent blog post here as one of the examples to demonstrate theOpenCalais SemanticProxy service. Have a look. Hallowe’en’s the right day to mention it: it’s kind of creepy.

Phil Barker, who works for the Joint Information Systems Committee’s Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (or, more briefly, JISC CETIS), posted FRBRizing Learning Materials on his blog last week.

I may have bitten off more than I can chew. I wanted an example for showing how the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) might be applied to a typical learning resource. I’m not entirely sure that there is such a thing as a typical learning resource, but the OpenYale online lectures seemed seemed like reasonable candidates. I chose one on Newton’s Laws of Motion as my example because it’s a subject I like.

Check out his diagram! Whew. Applying FRBR to a Complex Learning Resource: A Lecture, Transcript, Recordings and Supporting Materials (53 KB PDF) explains it all in more detail. Complex is right.

Diane Hillmann’s slides from her talk Facing Forward: The Challenges Facing Cataloging and Catalogers (2.4 MB PPT) are good reading. She covers what’s going on with RDA and how all this stuff (including FRBR) will work for the Semantic Web. Lots of examples and illustrations help to make it clear. It’ll be quite a change when cataloguers don’t enter a name, they enter a URI.

Claire Dupont of the Université catholique de Louvain pointed this out to me — she gave what looks like an interesting talk there — Workshop on FRBR in The European Library, which took place in Lison on 9 October. The slides for all of the presentations, Dupont’s and others, are available so go over and have a look through them.

I met Xiaoming Liu at Access 2008 earlier this month. He works on xISBN, xISSN, xOCLCNUM, xTHIS and xTHAT from OCLC. It was nice to finally be able to talk to him in person after reading his e-mails for so long.

He sent mail to xidentifier-l with some updates about the services last week:

• xISBN supports original language field
• xISSN has better peer-review status data
• xOCLCNUM starts to support “ebook” and “oca” collections (that’s Open Content Alliance)
• And the price and policy pages were updated.

“Successive Entry, Latest Entry, or None of the Above? How the MARC21 Format, FRBR and the Concept of a Work Could Revitalize Serials Management,” Kurt Blythe’s notes on a talk by Katherine Adams and Britta Santamauro, The Serials Librarian 54 (3/4), 2008.

ABSTRACT: Current cataloging practices are insufficient to the task of providing access to serial content. The presenters acknowledge that RDA (Resource Description and Access), FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and the CONSER (Cooperative Online Serials) standard record will improve libraries’ ability to respond to the exponential increase in information resources brought about by the Internet but feel that more may be done. Adams and Santamauro propose to apply the concepts of FRBR to serialscataloging and database design, in addition to the user interface, thereby saving time in cataloging and providing the user with cleaner records.

Also noted by the Serials Cataloger. I’ve got net connection problems and am running behind.

Couple of things to point out:

• More Puzzling Over FRBR from Karen Coyle.
• The Music OCLC Users Group and the Online Audiovisual Cataloguers got together last week. Makes sense. Heidi Hoerman posted her presentation about RDA on Slideshare. I can’t see the Slideshare slide viewing thingie, for some unknown reason, but you probably can. FRBR is mentioned therein.