The FRBR Blog

From Rules to Entities: Cataloguing with RDA, a one-day workshop, is happening today in Montreal, Canada. It’s organized by the Technical Services Interest Group of the Canadian Library Association. Among the speakers are Pat Riva, chair of the FRBR Review Group, and Tom Delsey, who played a large role in creating FRBR.

The whole event is being webcast and you can watch it (rather, listen to it — the video isn’t working) today, free and without registration, or later, because it will be archived.

Or, indeed, older than last week.

• On the Road at NJLA and the Five Colleges by Diane Hillmann. “The program was about FRBR and RDA for real people, and Rhonda Marker from Rutgers presented first. Rhonda and I have presented together before, and generally have fun with it, since we sometimes disagree and are very open about it, to the general amusement (or maybe consternation) of the audience.”
• FRBR Core Concepts: Domain Model: Jeffrey Young at OCLC took Ian Davis’s RDF expression of FRBR and generated this image to visualize it.

In late February Jodi Schneider and I did a talk at Code4Lib 2009, which I posted about with links to the slides: What We Talk About When We Talk About FRBR.

The video of the talk is now online!

Thanks to Talis and Karen Schneider and the Code4Lib organizers and Brown University for doing all the work.

FRBR: Things You Should Know, But Were Afraid to Ask was a talk Barbara Tillett gave at the Library of Congress in March and the video of it is now online.

This presentation for non-catalogers is intended to present basic concepts and benefits of using the FRBR conceptual model (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) in resource discovery systems.

Mail from Simon Chambers:

Dear colleagues,

I’d like to announce the launch of a new FRBR-based online music catalogue at http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au, which presents the Australian Music Centre’s documentation of music by Australian composers and sound artists.

The catalogue adapts the basic FRBR framework to incorporate additional entities beyond traditional bibliographic records, and to support additional functionality such as retail sales. Thousands of sheet music and audio samples are available through the catalogue, which also integrates our calendar of events (concerts/gigs featuring works in the catalogue) and online magazine (featuring articles about the people/works/etc held in the catalogue). The collection was previously catalogued in a MARC based system using AACR2.

Feedback is most welcomed as we continue work on developing the user-interface (which is somewhat raw at the moment…) and continue to populate additional data.

Regards,
–
Simon Chambers
Online Manager, Australian Music Centre

Level 4, 10 Hickson Road, The Rocks NSW 2000 — PO Box N690, Grosvenor
Place NSW 1220
ph. (02) 9247 4677 — fax. (02) 9241 2873 —
http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au

There’s no mention of AC/DC in their system so I picked something at random: Alice, an orchestral work by Gillian Whitehead. The works page links to two “products,” a score and a CD recording. Those are both Manifestations but I don’t see the Expressions listed, perhaps because it’s a very simple case. Have a look around and see what you find.

I follow Ian Davis (a Talisman) on Twitter so I saw when he said:

The Hobbit FRBRised into Linked Data courtesy of Open Library and ThingISBN http://ol.dataincubator.org…

The hobbit, or, There and back again, gives a human-readable simple FRBRization of The Hobbit, based on information from the Open Library and LibraryThing. It’s also available in RDF/XML and in Turtle, which is RDF in a more easy-to-read format. (More easy to read than RDF/XML, though not necessarily actually easy to read.)

Ian’s e-mail OpenLibrary data refresh 3 – Hobbit Edition explains it all.

It’s a great example. I’ll be posting here about related stuff soon.

There’s also this view of the same data as shown at linkeddata.urlburner.com.