Saturday, January 21, 2017

FRBR / LRM Lectures in China

FRBR / LRM LECTURES IN CHINA
Ben Gu, National Library of China
Published in IFLA Metadata Newsletter, Vol. 2, no. 2, December 2016

Pat Riva, Associate University Librarian, Collection Services at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, gave a lecture with the title "IFLA Library Reference Model: Overview" in the National Library of China (NLC), Beijing, China, October 21, 2016. As the chair of the FRBR Consolidation Editorial Group since 2013, Pat Riva spoke about the evolution of the IFLA models, describing the user tasks, modeling decisions, entities, properties, attributes, relationships, aggregates, seriality, and the plans for the next steps. About 120 librarians from NLC and other libraries in Beijing attended the lecture, and they asked many questions about the conception, the details and the future of the IFLA LRM.
Before the lecture in Beijing, Pat Riva gave the plenary session "Resource Discovery in the Internet Age" at the Zhejiang Forum on Public Digital Culture, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, October 17-19, 2016, and also talked about the library models in the Semantic Web and the relationships among library, museum and archives models.
Prior to that, the Shanghai Library had invited Pat Riva to present a Workshop on the FRBRoo Model and its Environment, Shanghai, October 14. During the workshop, Pat Riva introduced FRBRoo and its relationships with FRBR(ER), CIDOC CRM and IFLA LRM to the colleagues from the Shanghai Library and other librarians in Shanghai.
Since the publication of FRBR in 1998, there had been little attention from the Chinese library community until September 2002, when Barbara Tillett visited Beijing and introduced it to colleaguesin China. During the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, there were quite a lot of articles on FRBR published in Chinese journals of library science, and there were also some experimental projects for the application of FRBR to Chinese library catalogs. The Chinese version of FRBR (jointly by librarians from Shanghai Jiao Tong University Library, the Shanghai Library, Peking University Library and the National Library of China) was finally released on the IFLA website in 2008. However, FRBRoo and LRM had not received much attention from China. Pat Riva's lectures in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing will therefore have a special importance. I hope more Chinese colleagues will pay attention to the future development of FRBR/LRM.