The FRBR Blog

I made my last post here 462 days ago, on 12 April 2011. This blog has not been active for over a year, and I am not going to reactivate it. My interests have changed and my attention is elsewhere.

I would like to hand the blog or domain over to some person or group who can better use it. If you have ideas, let me know: I’m William Denton, at wtd@pobox.com.

If nothing works out, I will still keep the web site online, though dormant.

On 25 June 2005 I announced this blog to the FRBR mailing list and elsewhere. Any suggestions for what to do here to celebrate? Aside from preparing for the One Big Library Unconference two days later, that is.

Hello,

I was able to go to the May FRBR workshop hosted by IFLA and OCLC, and it
was very interesting and thought-provoking.  I'm really glad I was there.
One of the things that struck me was that many smart people are working on
FRBR but it's hard for the average person to follow it all.  It's
especially hard for people out of the loop of academic journals and
association memberships.  There's this mailing list, of course, but I got
to thinking that a FRBR weblog would be useful.

So I started one.  I've set up

http://www.frbr.org/

and filled it with some things I'd had bookmarked.  Please have a look
and tell me any suggestions or comments you have, especially including
good things to link to.  If you have something FRBRish on the web, or a
paper in a journal somewhere, I'd love to hear about it.

I hope that over the next few months I'll have lots of interesting links
to post, and that the blog becomes a useful resource for people--not just
librarians, but anyone interested in FRBR--wanting to stay up to date.

RSS feeds are available, and comments are allowed on all the entries.

I’m using the Firefox extensions LIbX and OpenURL Referrer now, and they’re great. I’m going to try adding COinS data when I mention a book or article. LibX will turn the ISBNs into live links to a library search. It uses xISBN! OpenURL Referrer will give you some kind of extra button that will do a library search.

• FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert Maxwell (ISBN 9780838909508)
• Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools by Arlene Taylor (ISBN 9781591585091)

What that looks like to me:

A quick note to let you know that I’m now Web Librarian at York University Libraries in Toronto, Ontario. I’m very happy to be there. If you’re ever at York, or in Toronto, feel free to drop me a note. (Feel free even if you’re not, of course.) I’ll be getting out to more conferences, so I’ll see you at those too.

It’ll be a slow month here. I’ll catch up later. Stay calm. Be brave. Wait for the signs.

I won’t post anything more until after Christmas. To help you pass the time, here’s FRBR Word Search #2 (35 KB PDF), a riotously amusing word search puzzle where you need to look for words like “obtain,” “aggregates,” and “ThingISBN.” For added frivolity, I added some names from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

In case you missed it, here’s last year’s word search puzzle. It’s an annual FRBR Blog tradition!

There’ll be no posts next week, but I’ll catch up later. Stay calm. Be brave. Wait for the signs.

It’ll be slow here this week and next, but look for an announcement about OpenFRBR soon thereafter.

Thermodynamics tells us that when heat is added to something, its atoms gain energy, they become more excited, and they began to jiggle around more. When heat is added to me, however, I lose energy, become less excited, and move less. It’s summertime in Toronto, it’s hot, and I’ll be posting infrequently. If I see anything of interest around the web I’ll point it out, and another example and, at last, the wrap-up of the 2006 FRBR Challenge will come soon.

For more on heat and jiggling I highly recommend listening to (or reading) the first of
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, “Atoms in Motion,” which is one of the greatest lectures I’ve ever heard. All the lectures are incredible. FRBR comes into play with the lectures, of course. They were recorded, and the recordings were made available on cassette and CD. The were transcribed, and have been published in hardcover and paperback in multiple volumes, and this year The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition was put out. Different groups of lectures have been collected in smaller books and audio sets. The lectures were given over two years. They are a work as a whole; each year is a course, and also a work; each lecture is a work, and it has different expressions (audio, written) which appear in many different manifestations. Mapping out all the relationships would take a while, even if one ignored the translations into other languages.

I’ve upgraded WordPress (the blogging software I use) to the latest version. Everything seems to be tickety-boo, but if you have any problems, please let me know. You shouldn’t notice any changes at all.