A weblog following developments around the world in FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.

Maintained by William Denton, Web Librarian at York University. Suggestions and comments welcome at wtd@pobox.com.


Confused? Try What Is FRBR? (2.8 MB PDF) by Barbara Tillett, or Jenn Riley's introduction. For more, see the basic reading list.

Books: FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert Maxwell (ISBN 9780838909508) and Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools edited by Arlene Taylor (ISBN 9781591585091) (read my chapter FRBR and the History of Cataloging).

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Last Week in FRBR #28

Posted by: William Denton, 9 July 2010 7:39 am
Categories: Last Week

Have you been trying RDA Online?

Test accounts for RDA Online were set up and log information sent around a couple of weeks ago. Have you tried it? The offer is open until the end of August. I had a short look, but I’ll go back for a longer look and post about it. I didn’t try doing anything with workflows, which is the most important part of it all.

Summers, Libraries and Linked Data: Confessions of a Graph Addict

Ed Summers (who works at the Library of Congress in the United States) gave a talk on 24 June 2010 at a preconference session on linked data before the American Library Association conference: Libraries and Linked Data: Confessions of a Graph Addict. I don’t know what he said, but Summers used something I posted here in 2007 about Copernicus’s De revolutionibus in part. Glad it was useful!

Murray and Tillett, From Moby-Dick To Mashups: Thinking About Bibliographic Networks

Four days later, on 28 June (and you’ll see this mentioned in the previous slides), Ronald J. Murray and Barbara Tillett (both also at the Library of Congress) were talking at the ALA convention proper: From Moby-Dick to Mashups: Thinking About Bibliographic Networks (25.3 MB PDF).

Summary: Traditional and contemporary attempts to identify and describe simple and complex bibliographic resources have overlooked useful and powerful possibilities, due to the insufficient modeling of “bibliographic things of interest.” The presentation will introduce a resource description approach that remodels and strengthens FRBR by borrowing key concepts from Information Science and the History of Science. The presentation will reveal portions of a network of bibliographic (and other useful) relationships between printings of Melville?s novel dating from 1851-1975 into the present. In addition, structural similarities between the print publication network and the multimedia “mash-ups” seen on YouTube and other websites will be demonstrated and discussed.

Slide 2 says: “EXPECT THIS: FRBR requires remodeling and generalization to improve its comprehensibility, and to better inform information system design and implementation … Remodeling FRBR requires the addition of a Resource entity.”

There are slides titled The Discreet Charm of the Hierarchy, too.

Another open-bibliography thread

More verbs. Electronic ‘Items’ (Yes, another FRBR thread) kicks off, yes, another FRBR thread on the open-bibliography mailing list. Karen Coyle says: “FRBR basically solidifies the traditional library catalog card view, which may be why so many of us are having a hard time with it.”

PIFF cites this blog

PIFF posted a blog entry citing and discussing The FRBR Blog: FRBR citation.

Despite this blogs simple layout it is a pain to navigate around, if only because there is so much of it. The normally useful navigation bar on the left hand side has been packed with so much information, as well as the standard blog stuff, that it takes a while find something unless you already know exactly where it is. With that said, the information on the navigation bar is really quite useful, offering links to web documents, books and other sites all to help with the understanding of FRBR. The content of the blog itself is just as impenetrable as FRBR …


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