The FRBR Blog

I just came across The Catalogue Display of the Future?, posted by Fiacre O’Duinn on his blog on 20 April. (He’s coming to the One Big Library Unconference in June.) It pulls together some interesting stuff about how FRBR could affect catalogue interfaces.

Karen Coyle sent Progress Report: RDA Vocabularies Project to the rda-l mailing list. “Note that the FRBR entities have been entered into the NSDL metadata registry sandbox [4] along with the FRBR relationships [5] and the FRBR user tasks [6].”

But then Diane Hillmann followed up to say, “The NSDL Registry now has the new version of its schema registration capability available, including the provisional registration of the RDA element vocabulary. Go to http://metadataregistry.org, and click on ’schemas’ in the right hand side browse list. Or go directly to: http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/1.html and click on the ‘Properties’ tab to see he currently registered properties.”

Ingbert R. Floyd and Allen H. Renear’s What Exactly Is an Item in the Digital World? is up in their university’s repository. (”Institutional repositories,” for those of you unfamiliar with the term, are web sites where people can put stuff. Which is no big deal, except that they’re official and run by an institution — probably a university or its library — and there are probably more good intentions about putting stuff into them then actual stuff getting uploaded.) It’s a five-page paper but it says it’s a poster from the 2007 ASIST conference, so I don’t know. Floyd’s new to the blog but Renear’s been mentioned before.

ABSTRACT: IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is a model of the bibliographic universe. Although initially its application to the digital world appears to be straightforward, upon closer examination puzzles arise. One is that within the digital world it is surprisingly difficult to say exactly what FRBR items really are. On the one hand, the ontological candidates for items (concrete physical states of the computing system) are rarely identified and treated as items in practice — even though they may indeed be affirmed as items in theoretical discussions. On the other hand, objects that manifestly fail to meet the basic ontological criteria for FRBR items are commonly treated as if they are items. We describe this situation and, based on a re-factoring of FRBR into a set of roles (relationships) rather than a set of entity types explore two possible resolutions. One, favored by the second author, is consistent with ontology implicit in the original FRBR vision, but allows assignment of item attributes and roles to things that are not items; the other, favored by the first author, is a radical departure from the underlying FRBR ontology, but preserves the original attribute assignments and roles.

Presentations by Peter Cliff of UKOLN, including one from a conference on 22 April 2008: FRBR and Metadata Application Profiles (4 MB Power Point).

Interesting: He tagged resources used in the presentation at http://del.icio.us/tag/vifws2008-frbr. Nice.

catprinciples.pbwiki.com was set up so that people could have early access to the final draft of the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (55 KB PDF). The document sets out the basic rules that IFLA says should underpin all cataloguing codes. It’s short, and the Statement is grounded in FRBR and FRAD. It’ll move to IFLA’s web site soon and I’ll post the fresh link.

The Statement of Principles – commonly known as the “Paris Principles” – was approved the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles in 1961. Its goal of serving as a for international standardization in cataloguing has certainly been achieved: most of the cataloguing codes that were developed worldwide since that time followed the Principles strictly, or at least to a high degree.

Over forty years later, having a common set of international cataloguing principles has become even more desirable as cataloguers and their clients use OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues) around the world. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, an effort has been made by IFLA to adapt the Paris Principles to objectives that are applicable to online library catalogues and beyond. The first of these objectives is to serve the convenience of the users of the catalogue.

These new principles replace and broaden the Paris Principles from just textual works to all types of materials and from just the choice and form of entry to all aspects of bibliographic and authority data used in library catalogues.

… These new principles build on the great cataloguing traditions of the world, and also on the conceptual models of the IFLA documents Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD), which extend the Paris Principles to the realm of subject cataloguing.

Sam Gyun Oh gave a talk at Topic Maps 2008 called MARC, FRBR and RDA: The Topic Maps Perspective. “So can librarians save the world? This presentation argues that they can at least make a significant contribution to solving the problem of infoglut, but only if they update their skill set and understand how the concepts they have worked with for decades can be applied using modern technologies like Topic Maps.” Slides available as PDF or PPT.

Thom Hickey, of OCLC fame, posted FRBR and Uniform Titles on his blog Tuesday.

AACR2 lists four uses for uniform titles, but the most common is to group items that appear with multiple titles under a single heading. Works such as Don Quixote that are published in multiple languages and under hundreds of different titles benefit from this. Unfortunately, when trying to group manifestations into works, uniform titles do not always correspond to what anyone would consider a work.

This isn’t directly about FRBR but I know you won’t mind.

Announcing the One Big Library Unconference

http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

E-mail: onebig@yorku.ca

When: Friday 27 June 2008, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Where: The Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

“It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special libraries, private libraries. But really there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world.”

The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians, technologists, and other interested people, talking about the present and future of libraries.

It’s organized and sponsored by York University Libraries and members of the YUL Emerging Technologies Interest Group: Stacy Allison-Cassin, William Denton, and John Dupuis.

In an interconnected world, all physical and virtual libraries can really be thought of as branches of One Big Library. We would like toget together and explore that concept. Areas of interest:

• The future of libraries
• Collaboration on building One Big Library collections and services
• Uses of social software in libraries
• Tools to support and extend the One Big Library

Our goals are:

• Bringing people interested in the future of libraries together with the hope of sparking collaboration and cooperation
• Starting conversations between people in different kinds of libraries, and people inside and outside libraries
• Intellectual stimulation and fun!

Find out more, sign up, and suggest a topic for a talk, on the wiki: http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

I don’t think Martha Yee (who did the Four Questions last year) will mind if I quote the entirety of her Wednesday e-mail to the FRBR mailing list:

In honor of Jimmy Durante (smile–see quote in signature below), all of my “What is a Work?” articles published in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly in 1994-1995 are now available at the UC eScholarship repository, as follows:

“What is a Work? Part 1, The User and the Objects of the Catalog.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1994; 19:1:9-28. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2709

“What is a Work? Part 2, The Anglo-American Cataloging Codes.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1994; 19:2:5-22. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2710

“What is a Work? Part 3, The Anglo-American Cataloging Codes, Continued.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1995; 20:1:25-45. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2755

“What is a Work? Part 4, Cataloging Theorists and a Definition.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1995; 20:2:3-23. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2711

Another relevant article that I wrote about FRBR-izing OCLC is available as well:

“Musical Works on OCLC, or, What if OCLC Were Actually to Become a Catalog?” Music Reference Services Quarterly 2002: 8:1:1-26. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2713

In addition, my recent article analyzing the differences among cataloging, metadata, descriptive bibliography, and abstracting and indexing services is now available:

“Cataloging Compared to Descriptive Bibliography, Abstracting and Indexing Services, and Metadata.” Invited for Ruth Carter festschrift, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 2007; 44:3/4:307-328. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2721

The Durante quote: “You have a dollar. I have a dollar. We swap. Now you have my dollar and I have your dollar. We are not better off. You have an idea. I have an idea. We swap. Now you have two ideas and I have two ideas. Both are richer. When you gave, you have. What I got, you did not lose. That’s cooperation.” (Yee cites Schnozzola by Gene Fowler, 1951.)

Preach it, Martha.

The CONSER Operations Meeting is on at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and on the agenda is Adolfo Tarango (of U California at San Diego) presenting a paper: FRBR for Serials: Rounding the Square to Fit the Peg (228 KB PDF). (CONSER is a cooperative online serials cataloguing program, among other things. Cataloguing serials (journals, magazines, newspapers, blogs) is non-trivial.)

Various presentations given and papers published over the past few years have addressed the issue of applying FRBR to serials. Each has started with the premise that FRBRizing serials cataloging is a good idea, but for the most part, all attempts have ended with the conclusion that serials don’t quite fit into the FRBR model. Creating separate usable work, expression, and manifestation level records is not possible. This proposal turns the cart around. Instead of attempting to make serials fit the FRBR model we make FRBR fit the serials publishing reality. As such, this proposal begins with a redefinition of the FRBR concept of work, and for purposes of cataloging, introduces the idea of a “work segment” record. The FRBR definitions of expression, manifestation, and item do not change. The end result is two practical applications: a potential serial authority structure and a possible serial bibliographic cataloging framework. Application of each resolves a variety of existing and emerging bibliographic control problems. These include creating a more holistic presentation of the historical run of a serial through its various title incarnations, limiting the proliferation of and need for uniform titles as distinguishing elements, reducing cataloging workloads, and improving bibliographic displays and navigation. The information that follows is in three parts. The first part gives the new definition of the serial work; the second presents the proposed serial authority structure, and the third covers the proposed serials cataloging concept of the work segment record.

… Taking inspiration from Martha Yee’s recent ALA midwinter presentation and a recently published paper by Everett Allgood, this proposed serials cataloging framework doesn’t attempt to create either an expression or manifestation level record, but rather blends both into a “work segment” record. A significant reason for doing so is a resulting labor savings, but also, it pushes the questions “Given the data recorded and user needs, do we need separate expression and manifestation level records, is having expression and manifestation level data in a single record such a bad thing, especially if there are labor savings and user service advantages to be gained by combining them in one record?”

Thanks to Tim Knight and The Serials Cataloger (who deems it “essential reading”) for the link.

(Updated 29 April so that the quote reads, “The FRBR definitions of expression, manifestation, and item do not change.”)