Today, I am going to be doing quite a few things, beginning with looking to critically evaluate a blog that I found using Technorati, a search tool I spoke about earlier.

Now, I'm sorry if this blog has already been done by someone else in my class but I can't access WebCT at the moment, I don't know if this is because of something in my settings (although I have turned on cookies and allow redirects) or if this is because WebCT is down. Again.

The blog I'm choosing to look at the the FRBR Blog. Oh piff, what is FRBR? I hear you say. Well gather round childrins and I will try to explain. (Or you could visit the blog and click the convenient "what is FRBR?" link.)

FRBR is an acronym which stands for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. I know that probably doesn't explain anything, so I'll try to lay it out as simply as I can, if only because I know that when I was first trying to understand, it was pretty boggling. Currently items in our libraries are recorded as singular items, with very little ties to any kind of related material. If you wanted a translated, re-edited or movie adaptation of something you would have to search for that item manually, this is true even if you are searching for an item within a series. FRBR proposes to change this by redesigning the behind the scenes work.

What people will see is that by searching for an item, the record for that item will have references (and hopefully links) to other items in the series and related items; so a search for Tolkien's Unfinished Tales will have the item record providing links to perhaps more of Tolikien's work, perhaps the reader's companion or perhaps the unofficial encyclopedia of Middle Earth. This all works closely with RDA (Resource Description and Access), which is the new set of cataloguing rules being formed to replace the AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules) that we currently use.


William Denton, 2005, The FRBR Blog, viewed 29th March 2010.

At first glance, despite this blogs very simple layout it is a pain to navigate around, if only because there is so much of it. The normally useful navigation bar on the left hand side has been packed with useful information, as well as the standard blog stuff that unless you know exactly where you want to go, it takes a while to get there. With that said, the information on the navigation bar is really quite useful, offering links to web documents, books and other sites all to help with the understanding of FRBR. The content of the blog itself is just as impenetrable as FRBR, at least to someone like myself who is only just beginning to learn about all of this, as it talks about manifestations and entities like they were old-hat; which, considering that FRBR has been around since 1998 and probably longer, to some it really is.

The author and webmaster of the blog is William Denton, who is the web Librarian at York University. His entry in the Librarian's profile section of York University's site has a link to his personal blog, which in turn has a link to the FRBR blog. He seems to be quite knowledgeable and on top of the latest news concerning changes to cataloguing and has had a paper concerning that very topic published by Libraries Unlimited.

On the whole I don't feel like I have learned a great deal from reading this blog but I have to say that this is most likely due to the fact that I don't really know enough to make proper sense of it. What it has given me are numerous pieces of information, both knowledge and other websites and documents to read and learn about the changes to cataloguing in the near future.