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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OpenFRBR and LC Fifth Business test

Posted by: William Denton, 14 November 2008 7:22 am
Categories: OpenFRBR,Uncategorized

I took an ISBN for a manifestation of Fifth Business, the great novel by Robertson Davies, and superduped it with my new superduping script. That left me with a list of ISBNs that xISBN and thingISBN think are other manifestations of the same work. I ran those ISBNs through isbn2marc and dumped out MARCXML. I ran that MARCXML through the LC FRBR Display Tool and ended up with an XML file that looks in part like this:

<work>
   <mods:name type="personal">
      <mods:namePart>Davies, Robertson</mods:namePart>
      <mods:role>
         <mods:text>creator</mods:text>
      </mods:role>
   </mods:name>
   <mods:titleInfo>
      <mods:title>World of wonders</mods:title>
   </mods:titleInfo>
   <expression>
      <mods:typeOfResource>text</mods:typeOfResource>
      <manifestation>
         <imprint>
            <mods:titleInfo>
               <mods:title>World of wonders</mods:title>
            </mods:titleInfo>
            <mods:note type="statement of responsiblity">Robertson Davies.</mods:note>
            <mods:originInfo>
               <mods:publisher>Penguin books</mods:publisher>
               <mods:dateIssued>1977</mods:dateIssued>
            </mods:originInfo>
            <mods:physicalDescription>
               <mods:extent>315 p ; 20 cm.</mods:extent>
            </mods:physicalDescription>
            <mods:identifier type="ISBN">0-14-016796-X (pbk)</mods:identifier>
         </imprint>
      </manifestation>
   </expression>
</work>

I wrote a script that reads that file, picks out the bits that OpenFRBR can use, and loads it up into the system. (script/runner lets you use the Rails environment from the command line.)

The results are on OpenFRBR now. I’m going to keep on this track for a bit to see how much I can get out of the LC tool and what bits are missing. I ran into some trouble along the way with character encodings but for now I just remove troublesome MARC records. Now I can go give Jodi Schneider’s paper a good read!

1 Comment »

  1. You missed two ISBNs (via Amazon):

    0141181389 and 1417646047

    Comment by Yakov Shafranovich — 14 November 2008 @ 12:01 pm

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