The FRBR Blog

Back on 18 October, in FRBR at Wyoming Conference, I quoted Janet Ahrberg, who’d enjoyed a talk about FRBR: “Because of it, I’m going home with ‘FRBR’ firmly implanted in my head.”

A video recording of the talk is online! Jerry Krois pointed it out in a comment to my previous post. It’s only in Windows Media format, which is a shame (non-proprietary formats are better), but I was able to play it with gxine. You can get it here: Rosario Garza: Reference, Resource Sharing, and FRBR: Why You Should Care (55 minutes, recorded 14 October 2005). The audio is fairly poor and the camera was just sitting at the back of the room, which is too bad, but it’s about FRBR!

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) are the latest buzz in the technical services world, and online catalogs will eventually be “FRBRized.” What does this mean for your day-to-day reference work? What about interlibrary loan staff? This program focuses on how FRBR affects the public services side of library work. Presenter: Rosario Garza, Bibliographical Center for Research (BCR), Aurora, CO.

Be warned, though: Rosario Garza says the FRBR final report is “a cure for insomnia” and “it’s not exciting reading, I wouldn’t recommend it”! Great Scott, I could hardly believe my ears. It quite upset my evening.

Do any of you know of any online videos of talks, lectures, or presentations about FRBR? Or just audio? If so, please leave a comment. Thanks!

Merrilee Proffitt posted Clay Shirky @ Long Now, and Flickr Rant on hangingtogether.org, a blog run by some of the staff at RLG, whom you’ll remember as the organization behind RedLightGreen, a FRBRy union catalogue showing works and manifestations.

That was a long sentence, and the mention of FRBR in Proffitt’s entry is only incidental, but if you’re interested in tagging and folksonomies and all that you’ll want to have a look.

Everyone in my old library school’s Information Technology Applications course has to set up a blog, it appears: here’s a list of them all.

One of them is Michael Sloan, who recently posted Hierarchical Catalog Records (Article Review). (Doing a review counts for 20% of his grade. FIS and SLIS at the University of Alabama are preparing cohorts of library bloggers for the world.) Anyhow, it’s an interesting and wide-ranging review. This D-Lib article is getting more attention than I’d expected. More of you should write more about FRBR!

With respects to my own experiences cataloguing at the University of Toronto, I can appreciate the motivation behind the FRBR way of rethinking the problem of analytical cataloguing. Cataloguing MARC records with AACR2 and MARC 21 rules is both a difficult task (one at odds with the tendency in universities to hire non-professionals for record clean-up) and at times frustratingly vague; for example, in the ALA reference book ‘Cataloguing with AACR2 & MARC 21’ (2004) it states: “The need to use uniform titles varies from one catalogue to another and varies within one catalogue” (3.1-51). Use of field 247 for Former Title, or Title Variations and field 130 or 240 for Uniform Titles suffer from this same kind of vagueness brought about by semantic ambiguity. The UTCAT includes additional bibliographic notes (i.e. 500 lines) which would be lost in the conversion process to FRBR, though from my own experience many of these notes seem to be more meaningful to cataloguers then the end users of the catalogue.

Here are three things from David Weinberger to check out, and one from Lorcan Dempsey, sorted for your convenience:

• Me in the [Boston] Globe about Google Print and book metadata
• Crunching the Metadata: What Google Print Really Tells Us About the Future of Books (Boston Globe, 13 November 2005; no registration required, may disappear soon)
• Two points that didn’t fit into the Globe
• FRBR Fervor (by Dempsey)

In the Boston Globe piece, Weinberger says:

First, we’ll need what are known as unique identifiers—such as the call letters stamped on the spines of library books. Unfortunately, any system that assigns numbers to books based on what they’re about is going to suffer from Dewey’s weakness. Both Google Print and Amazon use the International Standard Book Number, or ISBN. Created in the 1960s, the ISBN is a good starting point; still, it may not be the ultimate solution. Only books published since the ’60s have them, for one thing, and while a real-world library has to deal with each book as an inviolable whole—just try checking out a single chapter of a book—in the near future we’ll need identifiers for individual chapters, paragraphs, even illustrations. ISBNs only identify the book as a whole.

In his follow-up blog entry he adds what the editor cut:

First, books are way complex. What is Hamlet? Any book of the play? The Signet edition? A reprint of the Signet edition? The Signet edition with a new preface? With errata corrected? The Signet large print edition? The German translation? The original manuscript? Hamlet in the one-volume Collected Works? This matters because when you’re looking for a copy of Hamlet, you’re acting as if that were unambiguous when in fact there are various forms of the book that will or will not satisfy you. This is the type of complexity that drives people to create ontologies. Short of that, xISBN tries to cluster books in reasonable ways. . And there’s a standard (I can’t lay my hands on it now — FRBR? — I’m slightly on the road) that lays out the various levels of abstraction.

So, universal authority records and unique identifiers for all works. He’s certainly right about the complexity of books, and FRBR is exactly the way libraries are working to make it simpler. Dempsey comments:

Not only is there a granularity issue, there is an abstraction one which comes back to the question about what is a book? The ISBN, for example, is typically applied at the manifestation level (in FRBR terms). Do we need an identifier for works? What resolution and registration services would be useful so as to be able to tie together identifiers for the multiplying versions (think of the various digitization initiatives).

I was in a rush to point out this free two-hour online course from OCLC but then I noticed it’s not until 17 November 2006. So you needn’t sprain a wrist signing up right away.

This session provides a brief overview of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) as developed by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). The session outlines the background of the development of the Functional Requirements, the concepts involved and their potential impact on cataloging rules, bibliographic structures and systems design for cataloging applications.

It’s Thursday 17 November 2006, from 1:30 - 3:30 PM EST (UTC-5). You’ll need that Windows Live Meeting thing. Registration is required but free.

Andystardust has posted a paper he wrote about FRBR at library school. He says FRBR “has been the most interesting aspect of” his Organization of Knowledge class. “By far.”

Walter Tevis’ novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, for example, has been published many times since its original appearance in 1963. The edition that is currently available at Amazon, the Del Rey Impact trade paperback, is one manifestation. Likewise, Nicholas Roeg’s film has been released in various media over the years, including the VHS format, laserdisc and DVD. Even within the DVD format, there exist two separate releases of the film: one by Anchor Bay Entertainment, the other by Criterion. Each of these releases represents a separate manifestation of the broader work.

It is worth noting that, in terms of the cataloging of materials for use in library systems, most bibliographic records refer to a manifestation of a work and stop there. But a manifestation, like an expression or a work, is still an abstract conceptual entity. In an online catalog maintained by a bibliographic network like ILCSO, for example, a bibliographic record for the Criterion Collection edition of Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth is only a surrogate for that manifestation, copies of which may be held in libraries throughout the system. In order to refer to a specific copy of the Criterion edition, FRBR suggests the use of the word item.

Manifestations are “the physical embodiment of an expression of a work” so he’s a bit off on that one. In his example, the manifestation would be the complete set of all copies of the Criterion release of The Man Who Fell to Earth. I’m not a cataloguer, but from what I remember of integrated library systems, the one the cataloguer had in hand — an item — would be an examplar of the manifestation, the catalogue record would describe the manifestation, and each item going out to the libraries in the system would have information of its own associated with the record, such as which branch has it and perhaps who has it checked out.

Yasmin, a student at my alma mater the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, has posted a good review of the recent D-Lib article, Hierarchical Catalog Records: Implementing a FRBR Catalog.

There are, however, a number of shortcomings in the article. Although the Perseus Digital Library was presented as an “ideal testbed for research on FRBR” (p.3), there was no discussion of actual users’ experience with the system thus far. The article could have been strengthened if some user feedback (apart from the authors’ experience) had been included, or if the authors had indicated that at this point there was no usability testing or if any such testing is envisaged in the near future. User feedback is important in actually identifying any issues with retrieval or access in a hierarchical catalog.

Some of the criticisms can be countered by noting that D-Lib takes shortish papers and the authors perhaps didn’t have room to explain some things in detail.

Here’s a French cataloguer (I’m not sure of the name) blogging about FRBR last March: Les FRBR, qu’est-ce que c’est ?

Dans le contexte de la société de l’information, beaucoup de gens, et notamment les geeks, pensent qu’ils ont des choses à apprendre des bibliothécaires, car ces derniers ont une certaine expérience dans des domaines devenus clef : le catalogage, la classification, l’indexation. Pour faire ouvert, dites : les métadonnées, le Web sémantique, les ontologies. Ah, je vois une lueur d’intérêt dans votre oeil…

Or, pour gérer des données, ces gens-là (les geeks) travaillent de la manière suivante : ils font de la modélisation, puis des spécifications, et enfin ils implémentent. Nous, pauvres bibliothécaires et catalogueurs, le nez dans le guidon trop souvent, nous avons commencé par créer un format d’implémentation (MARC), s’appuyant quand même sur une norme (l’ISBD). Mais mieux vaut tard que jamais, nous avons fini par faire la modélisation et les spécifications de nos données bibliographiques : ce sont les FRBR.

Ah, les geeks et les bibliothécaires. Il y a un commentaire par Patrick Le Boeuf, aussi.

I stumbled across this just a couple of days ago, though it’s from September: Does FRBR Include Serials? A FRBR Implementation for All Formats (scroll down to the middle), by Craig Thomas, a report on the spring 2005 meeting of the New England Technical Services Librarians, filed in the NASIG Newsletter (September 2005). John Espley from VTLS gave a demonstration of Virtua.

Of the design considerations addressed, it was likely the question of display that aroused the greatest interest, many attendees curious as to what FRBR records even look like. Espley demonstrated VTLS’s proposed solution to this design challenge using as an example Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. (Today’s demo was PowerPoint-based, rather than live). On the top half of the screen, Virtua’s split screen interface displays the work-expression-manifestation relationships within a family of records as an expandable tree structure indented according to the entity level. Distinctive icons denoting each level provide added clarity. On the bottom half of the screen appears the record corresponding to the point in the tree one is highlighting. Each record below the work level possesses both a control number (field 001) and an 004 linking field (appropriated from MARC 21 Holdings Field 004, Control Number for Related Bibliographic Record). The latter corresponds to the control number (001) of the record at the preceding level. Manifestations thus link to their respective expressions; expressions link to the work.