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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Stephens, FRBRing RDA

Posted by: William Denton, 4 November 2008 7:57 am
Categories: Blog Mentions, RDA

Owen Stephens’s FRBRing RDA leads out of a lengthy discussion on the RDA-L mailing list possibly beginning with Kevin Randall’s FRBR User Tasks (was Alternatirves to AACR2/MARC21?). The thread breaks partway, so you’ll have to poke around the archives to find it all.

Secondly, I think FRBR and FRAD are OK, but I’m not sure they are really robust enough to base real world resource description on them. There are inconsistencies between FRBR and FRAD - see the discussion about ‘people’ from the DC-RDA listserv earlier this year. I think some of the things FRBR says about what counts as a separate Work are odd - e.g. two films of the same play are different works. I realise that others would disagree with me on this - which is fine, but seems an inevitable consequence of trying to apply a conceptual model in this way. Others have expressed their issues with the FRBR model in more detail and more eloquently than me – notably the work that Martha Yee has done.