The FRBR Blog

Steven MacCall, a prof at the library school at the University of Alabama, has posted slides from a lecture in his Information of Organization class: Historical Overview of Information Organization, AKA The ‘From Tablets to FRBR’ Lecture (requires Flash). It’s lecture three in his course and it looks like his students got a good introduction to FRBR. His students blog about their readings (for example, see Course Blog in Alabama in July 2005) and there’s always something about FRBR assigned.

I gave a guest lecture on FRBR last December to Joe Cox’s advanced cataloguing class at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto. It was recorded, but unfortunately the batteries died after 17 minutes and 33 seconds. I’m posting it here anyway, just for fun. You’ll have to imagine what the rest of the hour was like. The MP3 ends at an exciting point, just when I was about to explain expressions by distinguishing between two different translations of The Odyssey. The recording quality isn’t great; I think the background noise is the hum of the projector.

• the first 17 minutes of my lecture (14 MB MP3)
• the slides (210 KB PDF)
• the handout (167 KB PDF)

FRBR: What is it and Why Does it Matter to Me and My Users?, a two-hour online class on 24 March, offerd by SOLINET, a library organization in the southeast United States, for its members. The description says they’ll cover FRAR a bit at the end, too.

FRBR for Everyone is a webinar on 22 May 2006. It’s 1.5 hours long and costs $100 USD. It’ll cover FRBR, catalogues using it, and what lies ahead. Seems rather expensive to me.

A group of students from that library school at U of Alabama where they have those course-reading blogs I’ve mentioned have started up a wiki site, and there’s an entry on FRBR. I get the feeling FRBR is well known to all the students there. How well known is it to students at other library schools? I have no idea, but I hope they’re all talking about it!