The FRBR Blog

• http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm doesn’t work any more! IFLA’s changed their whole web site around and all of the old URLs broke. Everything ever written about FRBR used that URL, but now all the old pages return a 404. You can use archive.ifla.org as the hostname, or you can go to http://www.ifla.org/en/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records and poke around. I hope IFLA gets some redirections in place. The new web site looks spiffy, much nicer than the old one, but we all know Cool URIs Don’t Change.
• Definition of FRBR, by Jennifer Eustis, summarizing some talk on AUTOCAT: “3. FRBR’s user tasks do not apply to users in our current information society. FRBR was published some 15 years ago (1998). It is only now that libraries are talking about FRBR, a conceptual model that has not been tested. Much has happened in 15 years.”
• OCLC Numbers as Manifestation Identifiers, by Jonathan Rochkind: “In writing software to tie together disparate databases of bibliographic information, having un-ambiguous identifiers to represent a manifestation or edition (this isn’t about the specificities of FRBR, use whatever term you are comfortable with) is crucial for making things work simply and reliably.”
• Utility of FRBR/WEMI/RDA by J. McRee Elrod, the first message in an interesting thread on the RDA-L mailing list. Browse through.
• Note that the RDA-L archives have moved to a new URL because of the Canadian government. The old archives stop in February but they’re working on it.
• People attending the 2009 Canadian Library Association conference will be interested in From Rules to Entities: Cataloguing with RDA a preconference event on Friday 29 May. I think you’ll be able to watch it for free so check out that page even if you’re not going to Montreal. I won’t be at the preconference but I’m giving a talk on the Monday.

For fun, here’s a search for #frbr on Twitter. If you’re over on identi.ca, join the !frbr group I just created there.

Hi. Got a bit busy with things and had to let the FRBR Blog slide for a bit. This is a good time to say that in June this blog will be four years old and I don’t intend to keep on with it as it’s been. When I started this back in 2005, there wasn’t much talk about FRBR and there was no easy way to keep track of what was going on. Now there is a lot of talk about FRBR in the library world and a growing amount outside in the general web world. I want to stop trying to keep an eye on everything going on and dig deeper into a few things that interest me. Should this stay as a blog but open up to lots of contributors? Should frbr.org become something entirely different? If you have any thoughts, let me know in a comment or by e-mail.

Now, to catch on a few things.

• OpenFRBR is down. I hadn’t built in any restrictions on who could add or edit content so spammers were at it so hard they were really slowing down the server. I’ll let you know when it’s back up with some kind of spam protection.
• Ross SInger and I are going to tackle getting OpenFRBR to work in a Semantic Web/linked data way. More on this as it develops. There was a lot about linked data at Code4Lib 2009 and I’m excited about this approach.
• Definition of FRBR, a message sent to the AUTOCAT mailing list by Julie Hankinson, got a big discussion going. “How would I define FRBR for a non-cataloger? It’s one of those concepts–we all know what it is, but how do we explain it?” Lots of replies, some quite lengthy. Good thread.
• Two talks last week at the New England Technical Services Librarians 2009 conference: Metadata is a Plural Noun (9.5 MB PPT) by Karen Coyle (“From library catalog to LOD [linked open data], FRBR leads the way”), and Rick Block on RDA: Boondoggle or Boon? And What About MARC? (Via Christine Schwartz.)
• Testing Resource Description and Access (RDA), which has been up for a while but I don’t recall pointing out. The Library of Congress and others will be testing RDA before deciding whether to implement it. This will mean putting some of FRBR to the test.
• Chris Todd’s 2 March 2009 presentation to the National Library of New Zealand about FRBR, using the Scottish play as an example.
• UMR – Unified Metadata Resources, a blog post by Lukas Koster. To get the bibliographic universe on the Semantic Web, ” we only need the third essential component: every author his or her or its own URL… One single web page serving as the single identifier of every book, author or subject, available for everyone to link their own holdings, subscriptions, local keywords and circulation data to.” Naturally FRBR is mentioned.
• IFLA’s Statement of International Cataloguing Principles is finally final. “The principles stated here are intended to guide the development of cataloguing codes.” They are firmly grounded in FRBR: see sections 3 (“Entities, Attributes, and Relationships”) and 4 (“Objectives and Functions of the Catalogue”).