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 2.1

Posted by: William Denton, 5 December 2008 7:50 am
Categories: OpenFRBR

I’ve been hacking away the last few days and got a few good things working in OpenFRBR so I called it 2.1 and put it up.

  • Click to edit attributes of works and expressions (but reload the page to see the changes in the heading, because I don’t know how to update two elements at once yet). No Submit button necessary, because I use in_place_editor, some Ajax magic.
  • You can reassign an expression to a different work using the select menu at the top of the page. Look at the works list and find a work that has one or two expressions. The name (identifier) will end in “novel/1″ or “novel?/2″ or something like that. Look at the work, then look at its expression, then reassign it. Delete the work with zero expressions, if you want. This makes it easier to fix the mistakes made by an FRBRizing algorithm (like the Library of Congress’s, which I used on 160 or so Harry Potter bib records).
  • I updated isbn2marc so it uses a WorldCat API key if you have one. This really speeds things up and makes it easier to get lots of MARC records. I originally wrote isbn2marc because I had no access to WorldCat and needed to poll any open Z39.50 server I could find to get MARC records. Now I do have access to it, which is nice, but the script works as well as ever if you don’t use WorldCat. I think I got MARC records at WorldCat for 140 or 150 ISBNs out of the 180 I had, and I found 10 or 20 more at open Z39.50 servers.

There are character set problems but I”m just ignoring them until the next version of Ruby.

Working on this has given me a better idea of what to do next, but what with Christmas and all I may not get much hacking done the next little while. Some parts of the entity relationships aren’t all fleshed in, but I’ll probably take the Work-Expression relation and expose the relation attribute there and make that all nice and editable. After that I could use the same approach for other entities and relationships, that is, doing for the Embodiment relation (Expression-Manifestation) what I do with Reification (what I call the Work-Expression relation). I haven’t documented the data model yet but you can check the source code, or ask.