The FRBR Blog

open-bibliography mailing list

open-bibliography is the mailing list for the Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. (Consider joining if open bibliographic data is an interest.) There was some FRBR talk on the list this week.

• Is FRBR Too Complicated? asked William Waites, and a few people said yes, including
• Rob Styles, who pointed out Bringing FRBR Down to Earth
• “It seems increasingly useless,” says James Weinheimer.

The remarkable and ubiquitous Karen Coyle said “what it comes down to for me is that the Group1 entities are really a single entity with subparts” and expanded her email message into a blog post: FRBR and Sharability.

Christopher Gutteridge said he would like good FRBR Examples. This led to more discussion, with Tim “Mr. LibraryThing” Spalding saying LibraryThing has already got it working and “what’s needed is doing.” Karen Coyle pointed out the FRBR cataloguer scenarios on the DCMI web site.

Check the archives for all of it. Really there’s nothing too new about it, though. The same kind of discussion has happened on other mailing list, with mostly the same people. Which is perhaps more important than the substance of this discussion.

Free access to RDA from June to August: get it while you can

COMPLIMENTARY OPEN-ACCESS PERIOD shouts a page at the Resource Description and Access web site: “The contents of the RDA Toolkit will be open at no charge for everyone to try from the RDA launch date in mid-June 2010 through August 31, 2010. Sign up now and we’ll send you an email with your login information as soon as open access becomes available in mid-June.”

This really has nothing to do with open access. RDA costs money: $195 USD for one person for one year; $325 USD for one year for a site license with multiple users but only one accessing the system at a time. Open access means it’s free. This is a free trial period of a commercial product designed, I think, to entice customers and to help work out bugs.

I think RDA is a standard should be freely available to the entire world. That said, if you’re at all interested, especially if you don’t think you’ll have access to it when they charge a subscription fee, now is the time to try it out. RDA is built on FRBR (and it seems, from what little I know, that it will be a very interesting online system), so you’ll want to try it out.

Gemberling, Thema and FRBR’s Third Group

Thema and FRBR’s Third Group, by Ted Gemberling (DOI: 10.1080/01639371003745413) is in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 48:5.

For more on “thema” and “nomen,” read about FRSAD and last year’s Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD): A Conceptual Model, a companion to FRBR.

Abstract: The treatment of subjects by Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) has attracted less attention than some of its other aspects, but there seems to be a general consensus that it needs work. While some have proposed elaborating its subject categories—concepts, objects, events, and places—to increase their semantic complexity, a working group of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has recently made a promising proposal that essentially bypasses those categories in favor of one entity, thema. This article gives an overview of the proposal and discusses its relevance to another difficult problem, ambiguities in the establishment of headings for buildings.

RDA: 10-week Reading Program

RDA: 10-week reading program is just what it says it is. It’s week eight and I just found out about it! Sorry not to have posted about it before. Week 1 is the start. The only name on this is “Henry;” I have no clue beyond that who’s behind this.

Learning About RDA

Lots of mentions of FRBR et al on the Learning About RDA blog. There is a variety of writers, I think from a course at a library school who are doing this as part of their work.

University of Colorado at Boulder brushes up on FRBR

Brushing Up on FRBR describes how the 35 cataloguers at the University of Colorado at Boulder are reading and studying FRBR together!

They did it in a really interesting way, using digress.it to allow people to comment on each and every paragraph of the report. For example, here’s the definition of Expression, and discussion about it. It looks like there aren’t a whole lot of comments online, but I bet there was quite a bit of discussion in person. I hope it was a fruitful project.

Thirty-five cataloguers talking about FRBR — you know that’s going to be fun!

Panel participants wanted at ALCTS FRBR Interest Group

This hit various mailing lists:

Request for panel participants, ALCTS FRBR Interest Group
ALA Annual, Washington, D.C., Friday, June 25, 2010, 10:30-12:00 p.m.

The ALCTS FRBR Interest Group is seeking participants/presenters for a panel discussion on FRBR, its implications and implementations. All topics related to FRBR are welcome, but given the imminent release of RDA we are most interested in exploring issues other than descriptive cataloging. Some suggested topics include:

• implications for user interface design and implementation;
• FRBRoo and the CIDOC CRM;
• FRAD and FRSAD;
• overview and background on data modeling in general

Presentations should be brief, around 10-15 minutes, to allow for discussion time after the presentations. Please send a brief description of your proposed presentation by May 24, to our contact information below.

Thanks for your consideration,

Tami Morse McGill
Chair, ALCTS FRBR Interest Group
Catalog Librarian
University of Wyoming Libraries
tmorsemc@uwyo.edu
tamimcgill@gmail.com

Judy Jeng
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect, ALCTS FRBR Interest Group
judyjeng@comcast.net

OCLC raises limits on free access to xISBN and xISSN

Karen Coombs posted Daily noncommercial usage limits raised for xISBN and xISSN on the OCLC Developer Network Blog. Now you can do 1,000 queries a day, even if you’re just a regular person, and not affiliated with a library that’s got the right permissions with them. Well done, OCLC!