- VTLS Announces FRBR Software as a Service, Available Now for All Libraries with any OPAC. “VTLS Inc, a leading global company providing Visionary Technology in Library Solutions, announces an industry first: FRBR Software as a Service. Now, all libraries can present FRBR-enhanced records to their end users without having to FRBRize their entire database, while keeping and using their current ILS. FRBR SaaS builds on a library’s own ILS database and web-based online public catalog by providing a hosted database of matching FRBR records, an online public interface designed to match the source database, and hyperlinks to provide seamless navigation between the two.”
- LibraryThing: New API: What Work? “I’ve added a small, but nifty new API that provides a sure-wife way of connecting any site’s book data to LibraryThing. The ‘What work?’ API takes an ISBN and/or the book title and author and returns the LibraryThing work number, with link URL in XML.” Example: http://www.librarything.com/api/whatwork.php?title=Harry+Potter+and+the+Goblet+of+Fire. “In sum, if you can’t connect your data to LibraryThing now, you aren’t trying!”
- Karen Coyle, Un-uniform Titles. “The Open Library will soon be revealing its first attempt to bring together all of the many published books that represent the same work. It’s been a fascinating exercise; sometimes very satisfying and other times terribly frustrating. If I hadn’t already been convinced that we will need to change our data practices if we want to implement FRBR, this experience would have convinced me.”
- Kelley McGrath, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Summary, and talks about Work records etc. “Do people really judge books by their covers? If not, then why is it that the Penguin version of Passage to India is rated 5 stars while the Penguin Classic version only gets 3?”
- Talet Chaudhri, Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles, Ariadne 58. “The most obvious area of concern is the complexity of the FRBR model. It needs to be made clear whether the model fits the needs of resource delivery on the Web and, if it does, which factors have prevented implementation and how they can be addressed.”
- Open Library bug #338474: Tom Sawyer Detective frbr-ization problem
- Mike Tribby: We will cheerfully implement RDA when LC and a majority of our customers
adopt it. We will begin planning the changeover when one customer requests
records done to RDA specifications. One word in my first sentence is a lie.