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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Guidelines for Dublin Core Application Profiles (Working Draft)

Posted by: William Denton, 5 November 2008 7:30 am
Categories: Specifications

Karen Coyle sent out some e-mail yesterday about two new Dublin Core documents she’d written:

The first document is one I worked on — painfully, I must say — that attempts to explain the DC concept of Application Profiles. These are concepts we want to apply in the DC/RDA work, and my personal question to you all is: DOES THIS MAKE SENSE? Can we use this in our metadata environment? What’s missing, what doesn’t work, what needs clarification?

The first one is Guidelines for Dublin Core Application Profiles (Working Draft), which she wrote with Thomas Baker.

When it comes to metadata, one size does not fit all. In fact, one size often does not even fit many. The metadata needs of particular communities and applications are very diverse. result is a great proliferation of metadata formats, even across applications that have metadata needs in common. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has addressed this providing a framework for designing a Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP) that meets specific application needs while providing semantic interoperability with other applications on the basis of globally defined vocabularies and models.

I like application profiles. They let you pick and choose from other metadata schemas so you have just what you need, and they let you add and change what you don’t want. And if someone says, “Hey, that’s not how MODS or CanCore do it,” you can say, “Get lost. I’m doing it my way, to serve local user needs.

Anyhoo, FRBR is mentioned in these guidelines, for example:

A set of functional requirements may include user tasks that must be supported such as the following from the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)

Use the data to find materials that correspond to the user’s stated search criteria.

Use the data retrieved to identify an entity.

For the MyBookCase DCAP our functional requirements are:

Use the data to retrieve books with a title search.

Limit a search to a particular language.

Sort retrieved items by publication date.

Find items about a given subject.

Describe the author as a person with a name and email address.