The FRBR Blog

The spring 2006 issue of CONSERline has a section on FRBR:

Our opportunities as serials specialists include working with developers of new systems to make use of FRBR for accurately displaying serial “families” of related serials and formats. The very thought provoking program on serials and FRBR at NASIG provided many ideas on how FRBR can be used to think through relationships between serials and displaying them to users, but more work is needed with its application to serials in evolving systems.

Regina Reynolds (LC) and Diane Boher (NLM) are co-chairs of the PCC group that developed basic record requirements for a serial in any format using FRBR user tasks. As part of the access level record for serials project, the group developed cataloging guidelines aimed at reducing redundancies, making fuller use of system-display capabilities, and providing for the possibility of vendor or publisher supplied data being added to records at a later time. A pilot study was conducted involving 13 institutions to compare records created at the access level with those created at a fuller level.

There’s more, with some links. CONSER works on cataloguing serials. Related link: CONSER Task Group on FRBR and Continuing Resources.

There was a session at the North American Serials Interest Group conference on 5 and 6 May (see the program guide). Paul Weiss (University of California at San Diego) and Steve Shadle (University of Washington) did “FRBR in the Real World:”

Come see FRBR in action! We will present several real-life serial case studies and lead discussions with the audience about the ways FRBR’s conceptual model might be applied to each. Which cases are straightforward? Which are complex and merit further work by the developers of FRBR? We will also present mockups of ILS screens to show how these decisions might affect staff and public use of our data and systems. Come fine-tune your FRBR abilities, and contribute to the ongoing community discussions toward the refinement of the FRBR model.

Dalene Hawthorne left an enthusiastic comment about it on a blog:

The second session I attended yesterday was about FRBR in the Real World, and was presented by Paul J. Wiess & Steve Shadle. Here’s the gold of NASIG for me: Everything I know about FRBR I learned at NASIG. This session helped remind me of what FRBR is all about (which I learned at a previous NASIG conference, of course), and I was even able to explain it to a few colleagues after the session. I’m always less fearful of what is coming my way after attending a NASIG conference, and this is a classic example. I’ve been thinking “Oh, I’ve got to get my library ready for FRBR,” when all I really need to be thinking is “I just need to start explaining this model to my cataloging staff so they understand what’s going on out there and don’t get all worried.” Cool.

I noticed a presentation at the 2005 ALA Midwinter that deserves a link. (I found it by checking on the FRBR tag at Delicious.)

John Espley, from the library system vendor VTLS, gave a presentation called FRBR and ERM: A Vendor’s Perspective (1 MB Power Point) at the Codified Innovations: Data Standards and Their Useful Applications session. The second half is about electronic resources management (subscription and access information to online journals). The first half, about FRBR, discusses continuing resources, in this case Atlantic Monthly and its name changes over the years, with lots of screenshots showing how its bibliographic history can be organized. On the conclusion slide one of his points is about “super works,” but as I recall the FRBR people have come down pretty strongly against this, saying that there are many groups of works, and lots of relationships between the works, but we shouldn’t confuse things by adding another level to the hierarchy and talking about super works. The Working Group on Aggregates will clear this up.

This came out last year, but I hadn’t read it: Identifying the Serial Work as a Bibliographic Entity, by Kristin Antelman, Library Resources & Technical Services 48 (4) (2004). It’s available free for download free at the link above (which also has all the citations in a nice list) or directly from her home page (778 KB PDF). Here’s the abstract:

A solid theoretical foundation has been built over the years exploring the bibliographic work and developing cataloging rules and practices to describe the work in the traditional catalog. With the increasing prevalence of multiple manifestations of serial titles, as well as tools that automate discovery and retrieval, bibliographic control of serials at a higher level of abstraction is more necessary than ever before. At the same time, models such as the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions’ Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records offer new opportunities to control all bibliographic entities at this higher level and build more useful catalog displays. The bibliographic mechanisms that control the work for monographs-author, title, and uniform title-are weak identifiers for serials. New identifiers being adopted by the content industry are built on models and practices that are fundamentally different from those underlying the new bibliographic models. What is needed is a work identifier for serials that is both congruent with the new models and can enable us to meet the objective of providing work-level access to all resources in our catalogs.

I’ve made a new Aggregates category and put this and Ed Jones’s paper in it.

Ed Jones, of the National University Library in San Diego, California, has a paper called “The FRBR Model as Applied to Continuing Resources” in Library Resources and Technical Services 49 (4) (October 2005).

If you can’t get a copy of that, you could look through the slides of a presentation he gave at the ALA annual conference on 2 July 2004: The FRBR Model as Applied to Continuing Resources (229 KB PDF). (Here’s a conference trip report by Naomi Young that comments on that and a talk by Barbara Tillett.)

Ed Jones is co-chair of the CONSER Task Group on FRBR and Continuing Resources. See About CONSER if you want to know more about what they do.

Ed O’Neill left a comment yesterday with details about the new Working Group on Aggregates he’s chairing, and I’m pointing it out so you don’t miss it. Give it a look to see who’s in the group, what they’re going to do, and why.