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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31 October 2006

Carlyle wants to hear about user studies on work-grouping algorithms

Filed under: User Tests — William Denton @ 7:15 am

Allyson Carlyle sent the following to the FRBR mailing list last week. If you can help her, drop her some mail at acarlyle@u.washington.edu.

Do any of you know of a research project that actually tested the
effectiveness of work record identification algorithms such as
the FRBR Work Set Algorithm?  That is, how effective is it in
actually finding all of the records representing a work?  What
percentage of records does it identify, and what percentage does
it not find?

I'm writing an article and want to know for sure if anyone has
done this kind of research.

13 July 2005

Lazerow Fellowship won

Filed under: User Tests — William Denton @ 7:33 am

I was reading through the minutes of the 2004 meeting of the FRBR Review Group and saw mention of this announcement that Karen Letarte and Jacqueline Samples will be doing user testing of FRBR. They won the Samuel Lazerow Fellowship for their proposal, “Looking at FRBR Through Users’ Eyes: Toward Improved Catalog Displays for Electronic Serials.” The news release says:

Although the FRBR model has received a great deal of academic attention over the last five years, it is largely unproven in practice. The research proposed by Letarte and Samples seeks to measure the applicability of the FRBR theoretical framework within a test environment, using a random sample of library patrons who will search and display descriptions, both conventional and FRBR-based, and rank the usefulness of their results.

They won the fellowship about a year ago, and I have no idea how their work is progressing, but I look forward to reading the results. Testing with electronic serials is an uncommon approach, which adds interest.