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 #38

Posted by: William Denton, 10 December 2010 7:22 am
Categories: Last Week

Next-L

Three or four FRBR-related talks were proposed for Code4Lib 2011, which is great. This one especially caught my eye:

Next-L Enju, NDL Search and library geeks in Japan

Next-L Enju is an open source integrated library system developed by Project Next-L, the library geek community in Japan launched on November 2006. It is built on open-source software (Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL/MySQL and Solr) and supports modern ILS features (e.g. FRBR structure and RESTful WebAPI).

Enju has been inplemented by some libraries, which include National Diet Library (NDL), the largest library in Japan. NDL has chosen Enju to provide a new search engine, called “NDL Search” and added some extra features (e.g. automatic FRBRization and providing bibliographic data in a Linked Data format) . The development version is available at http://iss.ndl.go.jp/.

I’m one of the authors of Next-L Enju. I’d like to talk about the overview and structure of Next-L Enju, NDL Search and the activities of our project.

Presenter(s): Kosuke Tanabe, Keio University, tanabe at mwr dot mediacom dot keio dot ac dot jp

Perhaps someone who reads Japanese could comment about the FRBRization?

Seeking a Web-based FRBR Catalog

Mike McReynolds asked on RDA-L for examples of FRBR catalogues. He got some replies:

German National Library training materials

FRBR training materials from Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. This is to support the move to RDA. An introduction is available in English, then the actual training material is in German.

Coyle at SWIB

Speaking of Germany, Karen Coyle was there for Semantic Web in Bibliotheken 2010. She blogged about it and a conference in London:

I saw two examples of uses of FRBR that do not follow the structure provided in the FRBR documentation and both made good sense to me.

  • The Bibliotheque Nationale of France (BNF) is working to export its data in a linked data format. They are linking the Manifestation directly to the Work and to the Expression, rather than following the M -> E -> W order that is defined in FRBR. I need to think about this some more, but it seems to remove some of the rigidity of the linear WEMI.
  • The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek is using an identifier method that seems to resolve the (long) discussion I instigated on the FRBR list about identifying WEMI with a single identifier. They give an identifier to the single WEMI group (one work, one expression, one manifestation, and presumably one Item, but no one seems to be talking about items.) There is also an identifier for each W, E, M, I. This works well for input and output (and sharing). When a matching W or WE is found, a “merged” identifier is coined for the FRBR units. I couldn’t follow the presentation, as it was in German, but from the slides it looked to me that all of these identifiers could co-exist, and therefore would represent different views simultaneously of the bibliographic data that would depend on the function in play (e.g. export of data about a book v. support of shared cataloging).

Open Bookmarks planning

And a short last pointer sent by Jodi Schneider, to a post from the mailing list about Open Bookmarks, “a project to discuss, develop and design an open framework for saving, storing and sharing bookmarks, annotations and reading data in ebooks.” Are bookmarks made to an edition or a work? is a problem that should be handled with a FRBR approach. I’d never heard of the project before, and feel a bit rude in pointing at it like this, but if you’re involved (or get involved), then introducing FRBR to the planning would be a help.