The FRBR Blog

RDA Delayed

The release of Resource Description and Access (the new FRBR-based cataloguing rules) has been delayed until June 2010. Mary Ghikas sent a message:

RDA: Resource Description and Access will be published in June 2010. While we regret this delay in release of RDA, the transition from publication of AACR2 as a printed manual to release of RDA as a web based toolkit is a complex process with many interdependencies.

The updated text of RDA incorporates recommendations from constituencies and other stakeholders approved at the JSC meeting earlier this year. The revised text has been successfully loaded into the RDA database. The product is currently undergoing thorough quality review and testing in preparation for release.

We recognize that customers and prospective users of RDA need reliable and timely information for planning and budgeting. We are confident that this revised deadline is a realistic target for publication of RDA.

November 2009 had been the planned release date. It doesn’t surprise me that something so huge as RDA would go late, especially since they’re turning it into a customizable online system.

Ronald Murray and Paper Tools

I mentioned last week that Ronald Murray was giving a talk on 30 November at the Library of Congress, where he works. Now he’s made available a PDF with his slides: Reimagining the Bibliographic Universe: FRBR, Physics and the World Wide Web (24.4 MB ZIP with 472-slide PDF inside). A screencast of the talk will be up on the LC web site soon, so watch out for the link.

Open Library

In An Update on Open Library, someone (George Oates?) posts about a number of big things going on at the Open Library, including this:

Works

Open Library (and a lot of other library systems out there) deal with books at the edition level. This makes finding “War and Peace” really tricky, because all we can currently return are the hundreds of editions in a big unordered list that’s very difficult to parse. In line with a new reasonably new cataloging standards initiative called Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), we’ll be introducing a “super-level” of book called “the Work”. The idea is that you’ll be able to use this “Work” as a starting point into the books you’re interested in. We’ll be able to list things like all a Work’s editions (including translations of the original), the subjects of the book, and excerpts, all at that “super” level that describes what the Work is about almost in spite of how many editions have been printed.

We have been toiling for the past several months to roll up all our editions into logical Works. This is incredibly tricky, and as much as we would like it to be bulletproof perfect on the first go, it’s likely people will see one edition that should be in certain Work, or author records that are really same person. The next logical step for us will be to provide tools to help you fix a glitch like that if you find it. That said, we’ve been testing our brand new Work search lately, and it’s given me (at least) an entirely different and exciting new view on the Open Library. We can suddenly see things like the books in our catalog with the most editions, or all the Works by Mark Twain (instead of a massive list of all the editions he’s supposed to have written) and more. Truly, it’s invigorating after being stuck in the edition “mud” for so long. Not that edition data is bad, of course, just that the aggregate is extremely useful.

There are some interesting UI challenges coming up around questions like when we should show a Work in the search results opposed to when we should show an Edition, but we’ll go with what feels right for now and listen to what you all think and adjust into the future.

Great news!