The FRBR Blog

Just to keep things rolling along and so you don’t miss anything, there are two recent comments I want to point out:

In a comment on Dan Brickely and the W3C, Karl Dubost from the W3C said, “It would be cool if you could explain how FRBR could be used in details for example to manage an album photo. That would be a concrete use case and would help people to develop the tools if all requirements are defined.” He included a couple of links to some W3C discussion about this last February. I’d never thought about applying FRBR to a photo album, but it’s a great challenge. Add a comment if you have one.

And in a comment on AustLit, Kerry Kilner, AustLit’s executive manager, left a comment saying anyone interested in FRBR is welcome to ask for the password for their permanent guest account. That’s very generous, and I’m certainly going to ask for it. You can get in touch with him through AustLit.

Kent Fitch, also from AustLit, was kind enough to send me an XML dump of how Souls in the Great Machine is represented in their system, and it’s wild viewing. It goes over twenty levels deep in some places, and has lots of <work>, <expression>, and <manifestation> tags. I’ll slurp it up into a Perl XML parser so I can examine it more. I like reading XML, but I have my limits.

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.

AustLit is often given as an example of how FRBR can be put to very good use, but if you’re like me and not living in Australia then you probably won’t get a chance to see it in action. However, you can see some samples of how it works, and read lots about it. It looks really useful and will be of great interest to anyone implementing FRBR.

I assumed AustLit was open to all, but it’s not, it’s only available to subscribers. I wanted to see how they handled Sean McMullen‘s Souls in the Great Machine (1999), which is a work that is a blending of two earlier works. (You should read it: it’s set in an Australia one thousand years in the future where librarians fight duels to the death.) Here is AusLit’s entry for Sean McMullen, but non-subscribers can’t see any of the interesting information behind it.

Nevertheless, they have some sample pages up for viewing. Their basic search is complicated enough to be anyone else’s advanced search, and their advanced search lets you build a customized search. They have a page up about Patrick White’s Voss, and it shows three related works (including an opera) and fourteen expressions, some with multiple manifestations. (You may wonder why the English version of the novel isn’t listed first, it being published first, and so did I.) They stop at the manifestation level; item information, which is to say library holdings, can be found elsewhere.

One great thing about AustLit is the amount of documentation they’ve put online. Don’t miss AustLit Data Models, this development site with things they were thinking about in 2000, and a huge manual about what a work is and how to handle one.

Marie-Louise Ayres, who was in charge of the project, has presented papers about it, such as Case Studies in Implementing FRBR: AustLit and MusicAustralia (2004, in Word) and AustLit: A Gateway on Steroids (2001?, with Kent Fitch, Annette Scarvell, and Kerry Kilner). That second one has this nice statement:

One of our major worries in adopting the FRBR model was that it could prove too expensive to create and maintain FRBR records. This has certainly not proved to be the case. Educating our staff about the FRBR model certainly took a lot of work, especially because practical implementation raised many issues. But once they were familiar with the model, they loved the fact that it allowed them to represent works in a rich context. They also thoroughly enjoy the maintenance interface which gives them many choices about how to describe works and authors, and gives instant satisfaction: create or edit the record, update it, see it in the browser immediately. We also have a very effective review interface, which allows our two Content Managers to review work and provide timely feedback by email. From a management point of view, I am absolutely thrilled about the productivity of the staff, and our earlier fears about the expense of both implementing and using the model have been emphatically put to rest.

I’ve been browsing around librarian blogs and seeing what mentions of FRBR they’ve made, and this entry in Dorothea Salo’s blog Caveat Lector pointed me to an interesting paper from the 2003 Extreme Markup Languages conference: An XML Document Corresponds to Which FRBR Group 1 Entity? by Allen Renear, Christopher Phillippe, Pat Lawton, and David Dubin, all of whom are from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign except for the last, who is just from the University of Illinois alone. A PDF of the paper is also available.

XML documents as defined in the W3C XML 1.0 specification, are now an important part of this bibliographic universe and it is natural to ask to which of FRBR’s “Group 1” entities does the XML document correspond. Curiously, there seem to be conflicting arguments for assigning the XML document to either of the two plausible entity categories: manifestation and expression. We believe these difficulties illuminate both the nature of the FRBR entities, and the nature of markup. We explore a conjecture that an XML document has a double aspect and that whether it is a FRBR manifestation or a FRBR expression depends upon context and intention. Such a double-aspected nature would not only be consistent with previous arguments that the meaning of XML markup varies in “illocutionary force” according to context of use, but might also help resolve an old puzzle in the humanities computing community as to whether markup is “part of” the text.

I don’t know what people think about this idea now, but feel free to leave a comment with an update. It’s an interesting question.

FRBR will be of immense help in organizing music recordings and making them easy to access. A closely related implementation is Variations2, which “provides online access to selected recordings and scores from the Indiana University Cook Music Library for use by IU Bloomington students, faculty, and staff. ” The way it works is quite FRBRish, but unfortunately you can’t see it because it’s a restricted-access system that requires a special client. Jenn Riley, who works on it, is presenting a paper about it at a conference this summer and if it becomes available online I’ll link to it.

Further reading:

• From Abstract to Virtual Entities: Implementation of Work-Based Searching in a Multimedia Digital Library, by Mark Notess, Jenn Riley, and Harriet Hemmasi (2004). “Like FRBR, our system is work-centric, being influenced by the work of both Velucci [12] and Smiraglia [13]. We have implemented a digital music library, Variations2, based on that metadata model, have deployed the system in our music library, and have seen increasing usage over the past year and a half.” Includes screenshots.
• Papers and Presentations about Variations2

Jenn Riley, whose Inquiring Librarian blog I’ve linked to before, came back from a conference last year and gave a presentation, at her library at Indiana University, called “How the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) are Changing Library Services: A Report from an ALCTS (Association for Library Collections and Technical Services) Conference.” The presentation slides and handouts (both PDFs) are available (other formats available here).

It’s a general overview meant for people who are new to FRBR, so there won’t be much new for most readers of this blog, but there are some good examples in the middle of how a FRBRized online catalogue could look and how FRBR helps collocate works and expressions and manifestations. I always like seeing what other people use as examples.

The June 2005 (Vol. 9 No. 6) issue of Information Outlook (the monthly magazine of the Special Libraries Association) has an article about taxonomies that mentions FRBR without mentioning FRBR. I quote from “Knowledge Taxonomies: What’s the Role for Information Professionals?” (pp. 45-52) by Jo Anne Côté:

The teaching of classification schemes should emphasize synthesis and taxonomy development to better prepare library and information professionals for all aspects of the current information environment and that of the future. An understanding of Natural Language Processing, ontology in general, and the potential of keyword searching would help in determining how best to organize information and make it available. Facility with the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions’ Entity Relationship (ER) model for bibliographic records would help in adapting traditional cataloging skills to more abstract and conceptual ways of organizing information. The ER model characterizes the universe in terms of entities and their relationships, which is similar to network taxonomy.

FRBR doesn’t get mentioned by name, and the only related source in the bibliography is to Barbara Tillett’s paper from the 1994 IFLA conference, IFLA Study on the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records: Theoretical and Practical Foundations. Not very helpful.

Morbus Iff’s LibDB is stalled because he got too busy, but it’s worth a look. If you’re a PHP hacker than you can contribute, and if not, you can just look at the table structure in the database and see how he laid things out. The home page says:

LibDB allows you to smartly and easily catalog your movies, books, magazines, comics, etc. into your own computerized “personal library”. It is a free, open sourced, library and asset management system based on and inspired by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (pdf), triples from the semantic web, and “the end-user doesn’t, and shouldn’t, need to know this stuff”.

It’s built on Drupal, an open source content management system. I got it installed on a FreeBSD system in about half an hour (that’s starting with installing PHP), and only had one small problem. I was getting this error:

# mysql -u drupal -p drupal < libdb/libdb.mysql
Enter password:
ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 24: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check
the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right
syntax to use near 'condition TEXT, treatment TEXT, scheduled_treatment
TEXT, access_restrictions TE' at line 1

I renamed the condition table to condition1 and it worked. It seemed to be a conflict between LibDB and MySQL 5, which thinks "condition" is a special reserved word.

Roberto Sturman’s ISIS FRBR Prototype Application (or IFPA) is a working example of a FRBRized catalogue. You can select the “index” link on the right to browse all the works, expressions, etc., or you can just do a search, for example on “the deptford trilogy” as a work. That shows one result, the trilogy by Robertson Davies, which has three whole-to-part relationships (to the books that make up the trilogy) and one responsibility/ownership relationship (to Davies as author). If you follow the whole-to-part relationship to Fifth Business, you’ll find it in turn has one reciprocal part-to-whole relationship to the trilogy.

The IFPA home page explains more about the project, and gives a link to Implementing the FRBR Conceptual Approach in the ISIS Software Environment: IFPA (ISIS FRBR Prototype Application), by Roberto Sturman, which appeared in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly Vol. 39 Nos. 3-4 (2004) in that FRBR special I mentioned in May.

Thanks to the Panlibus blog for pointing this out last November.

While searching on “frbr” at Clusty, I came across some e-mail that Dan Brickley sent to the W3C TAG (Technical Architecture Group) mailing list last week: InformationResources, FRBR and googling towards a literature review. It’s part of a thread about the nature of information resources.

While I’m *delighted* that http-range-14 has been defused, I’m really not yet sure that the class “information resource” can be uncontroversially defined without a fair bit of hard work. There’s a big literature around this distinction, eg. see in the digital library world, the debates that spun out of the interaction between Dublin Core (library) and INDECS (rights holder / publisher) metadata efforts….

If the TAG decide to pursue this task, I do recommend that FRBR gets some serious attention, as it has a lot of mind-share in the library and digital library world. My understanding is that FRBR is best thought of as an attempt to come up with a conceptual model that allows information systems to be clear about distinctions such as between different versions of Hamlet, different editions, different physical books and their location in library or who they’ve been lent to, as well as the larger challenge of engaging with complex, composite, mixed-media works.

He throws some cold water on the crossover between FRBR and what the W3C is doing in this subsequent e-mail.

Chris Wilper brought up FRBR on the same list last September, also in a thread about information resources.

It would be exciting if the W3C could make use of FRBR in building the semantic web.