The FRBR Blog

Minutes of the FRBR Review Group’s Meeting: Oslo, August 18, 2005 (274 KB PDF) are finally available from the Review Group’s web site. It’s ten pages long, has the minutes of the one meeting they had at the IFLA conference in the summer, and includes reports from the working groups, the election of a new chair, and a list of decisions made about possible changes to FRBR.

If you weren’t at the meeting (and unless you’re one of nineteen people (from thirteen countries!), you weren’t), you’ll want to read this to know what was discussed and what the Review Group’s plans are for FRBR.

3) Future plans for the Review Group

Given the importance of the topics to be addressed, the newly formed WG on Aggregates will presumably prove to be a major element in the RG’s policy for the two years to come.

The WG on FRBR teaching and training, chaired by Maja Žumer, and that was dormant until now, might become active this year. Materials such as lectures, experience reports from teachers, etc., could be posted on the page of the RG’s Web site that was created for that purpose.

Maja Žumer suggested that the conclusions from the Dublin Meeting be taken as a starting point for the RG’s future plans. Those conclusions are examined and distributed among the various WGs affiliated to the RG:

• “The FRBR Review Group will focus on the revision of attributes and relationships that are defined for Group 1 entities, as the FRANAR and FRSAR Study Groups will deal with Group 2 and Group 3 of entities”: this task remains to be done at the RG’s level.
• “A ‘middle implementation model’, which will include a practical definition for the Expression entity, will be developed by the FRBR Review Group”: this task is to be done by the WG on the Expression entity.
• “The FRBR Revision Group will post on its Web site more examples of ‘agglomerates’ for commentators to react, so that consensus can be reached about the best way to deal with such complex entities as anthologies, collected vs. selected works, serials, etc.”: this task is to be done by the WG on Agglomerates.
• “The FRBR Review Group will contact the CONSER Task Force on FRBR & Continuing Resources in order to take benefit of their approach to continuing resources”: this task is to be done by the WG on Agglomerates.
• “The utmost complex topic of Web resources is postponed for the time being”: but it will have to be addressed by the WG on Agglomerates.
• “Is the Subject relationship a Work property only? The FRBR Review Group thinks that ‘aboutness’ is actually only at the Work level, but that subject headings such as we currently know them do not deal exclusively with ‘aboutness’. The FRSAR Study Group will explore that”: as a consequence, it goes out of the scope of the FRBR RG.
• “The FRBR Review Group will contact vendors in order to ask them what they think the issues are for introducing the FRBR concepts into library catalogues. What do they expect from us in order to go ahead? What are their needs?”: this has been incepted by Alan Danskin.
• “The FRBR Review Group will besides strive to promote and stimulate research and study by doctoral students, professors, etc.”: this is to be done by the WG on FRBR teaching and training.
• “The FRBR Review Group acknowledged that the FRBR model would benefit from an ontology, and that the FRBR/CRM Harmonisation Group is going in that direction”: this task is therefore already distributed.

Barbara Tillett also insists that the suggestions from the FRANAR Group and IME ICC should be examined. She volunteers to compile all of them after the series of IME ICC meetings will be over.

ALCTS last week posted IFLA Reports From the 2005 World Library and Information Conference, Oslo, August 14–18, 2005. It covers everything at the conference and includes FRBR groups and meetings.

Cheryl Tarsala, who’s teaching a cataloguing course at the library school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (or Shampoo-Banana, as some call it), has a blog called The Quaquaversal Cataloger. She mentioned that Tuesday morning she was going to see Arlene Taylor (whom you’ll know from Wynar’s Introduction to Cataloging and Classification and much else) give a talk on FRBR.

The word continues to spread!

Spied on a blog, this call for speakers at the ALA Midwinter 2006: ALCTS CCS Cataloging Norms Discussion Group. They list FRBR as something they’re interested in. You’d have 15-20 minutes.

The full name is the American Library Association’s Association for Library Collections and Technical Services’ Cataloging and Classification Section’s Cataloging Norms Discussion Group, in case you didn’t know.

A quick note: the National Library of Sweden, the Royal Library, sent a copy of their comments on FRAR to the FRBR mailing list.

[W]e are very impressed with your clarifying and interesting report which has been a pleasure to study.

Their comments, about the amount and purpose of information being stored about individuals, will soon make it into the mailing list archive, which is linked over on the left.

Catalogablog pointed out that the American Library Association’s Association for Library Collections and Technical Services’ Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access Task Force to Review the Draft Functional Requirements for Authority Records (FRAR), or the ALA ALCTS CC:DA TFRD FRAR as my friends and I call it, has released their Comments on FRAR (63 KB PDF).

We find the document to be generally acceptable although at times not intuitive or easily grasped.

As mentioned here in August, the FRAR draft is open for comment until tomorrow. Last call to send your comment to Glenn Patton.

The CC:DA also has a Task Force on FRBR Terminology that keeps on eye on that for the ALA.

A group of students from that library school at U of Alabama where they have those course-reading blogs I’ve mentioned have started up a wiki site, and there’s an entry on FRBR. I get the feeling FRBR is well known to all the students there. How well known is it to students at other library schools? I have no idea, but I hope they’re all talking about it!

This call for papers was sent to the FRBR mailing list last week. The FRBR/CRM Harmonization Group will make a report, I’m sure, about things such as were discussed at the Third FRBR/CRM Harmonization meeting in March this year.

The CIDOC annual meeting and conference 2006 will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden, September 10-14 2006, in the localities of The Museum of World Culture and nearby venues. Invitation and further info at: http://cidoc06.se

CIDOC is the international focus for the documentation interests of museums and related organizations - an international committee of ICOM - International Council of Museums

The conference themes enlighten the fact that more and more efforts are taken in the field of cross border cooperation and the focus on standardisation from outside the traditional museum sector.

At the same time as other organisations and users looks at museums we also have to look at the knowledge management movements outside museums and to collaborate between sectors as natural and cultural heritage. Aspects as fighting illicit traffic with heritage objects and bringing intangible heritage knowledge to future needs, amongst others, also form a challenge for the documentation systems.

We also would like to enforce the museology and information science researchers to study the standardisation evolution within the museum field.

Opening for a broader knowledge of CIDOC and the CIDOC work we hope to gain a stronger adoption in everyday work in museums, and a more active partaking in future CIDOC activities.

We welcome and encourage — together with the established experts — students, young professionals and curators coming from the universities and not earlier represented museums around the world, to take part in the conference as delegates - and to become members of the CIDOC.

See more information on the conference at - http://cidoc06.se

Aplicación de los “Requisitos funcionales de los registros bibliográficos” (FRBR) en los catálogos en línea by Yolanda Martín González and Ana B. Ríos Hilario (ACIMED 13:4) has been deposited in E-prints in Library and Information Science. It’s in Spanish, but there’s an English abstract. The screenshots will help you if you don’t read Spanish.

[Spanish Abstract] El catálogo automatizado es uno de los instrumentos de recuperación de la información bibliográfica por antonomasia. Dicho catálogo actualmente se halla en un proceso de adaptación a modelos conceptuales nuevos como el propuesto por la IFLA en el año 1998: Requisitos Funcionales de los Registros Bibliográficos. Se analizan con detalle, algunos de los catálogos - Austlit Gateway, Virtua, LibDB y RedLightGreen - que se encuentran en el proceso de adecuar sus estructuras a dicho modelo con el objetivo de evaluar en qué medida ello contribuye a solucionar sus deficiencias actuales. Se explica en qué consiste el modelo mencionado y se definen sus entidades. La implantación del modelo propuesto en los catálogos en línea constituye un avance importante en lo referente a una mejor y más eficaz recuperación de la información que contienen.

[English Abstract] The automated catalogue is metaphorically one of the bibliographical information retrieval instruments. This catalog at present is under a process of adaptation to new conceptual models as the one proposed by the IFLA in 1998: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Some catalogs - Austlit Gateway, Virtua, LibDB and RedLightGreen - that are under the process of adapting their structures to this model are analyzed in detail to evaluate to what extent it contributes to solve their current deficiencies. The above mentioned model is explained and its entities are defined. The introduction of the proposed model in the on-line catalogues is an important advance regarding a better and more effective retrieval of the information they contain.

There’s a great new paper at D-Lib: Hierarchical Catalog Records: Implementing a FRBR Catalog by David Mimno, Gregory Crane, and Alison Jones. It’s about how they used FRBR in making a catalogue for the Perseus Digital Library, a wonderful resource holding classics. papyri, Renaissance writing, and much more.

Abstract

IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) lay the foundation for a new generation of cataloging systems that recognize the difference between a particular work (e.g., Moby Dick), diverse expressions of that work (e.g., translations into German, Japanese and other languages), different versions of the same basic text (e.g., the Modern Library Classics vs. Penguin editions), and particular items (a copy of Moby Dick on the shelf). Much work has gone into finding ways to infer FRBR relationships between existing catalog records and modifying catalog interfaces to display those relationships. Relatively little work, however, has gone into exploring the creation of catalog records that are inherently based on the FRBR hierarchy of works, expressions, manifestations, and items. The Perseus Digital Library has created a new catalog that implements such a system for a small collection that includes many works with multiple versions. We have used this catalog to explore some of the implications of hierarchical catalog records for searching and browsing.

Don’t miss the appendix (794 KB PDF) which is a printout of an XML record showing the work Vergil’s Aeneid and its expressions and manifestations. If you have the time, look at what they put in which tags for the two English translations (and the Latin version). The title and translator are in the manifestation level, but shouldn’t they be at the expression level? The publisher is at the manifestation level, which is right, and there is no item level.

Notice that at the top of their home page for Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid you can go to another English translation or a Latin version. In fact, on any page in any edition, you can jump to the identical position in another edition. (If you look at it in their new interface then the other translations are listed on the right.) I presume this is generated from the FRBR data.

There’s a screenshot in the paper of the catalogue, but I can’t find it on their web site. If you see it, please leave a comment.

(First noticed on Catalogablog.)