Last week in FRBR
- 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.