The FRBR Blog

It’s a great pleasure today to give you the Four FRBR Questions answered by Dr. Barbara B. Tillett, Chief of the Cataloging Policy and Support Office at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She’s been involved with FRBR for almost fifteen years now! For more about that and the rest of her career, read “An Interview with Barbara B. Tillett,” by Martin Kurth (Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 32 (3), 2001). I mention her a lot on this weblog because she’s very involved with FRBR and has spoken about it all over the world. She’s a member of (most pertinently here) the FRBR Review Group and the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR.

When did you first hear about FRBR?

In 1992 when I was asked to be a consultant to the Study Group on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records with Elaine Svenonius and Ben Tucker. Later Ben retired and Tom Delsey was brought on.

What’s your involvement with it now?

I continue on the FRBR Review Group and continue to speak about the conceptual model and its application to various things like serials, cataloging rules, authority control, other standards, etc.

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

Very loaded question as it assumes an FRBR world, which, if we had it, would be great and probably not need anything! But on the other hand if you mean what does the world need need with respect to FRBR organizing the descriptions of our resources and meeting user needs, it needs a great system to take full advantage of the FRBR model’s potential, making the data entry and maintenance simple and the user navigation and understanding intuitive.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

FRBR is a model of the relationships among things libraries organize and is a listing of the essential information we use to find, identify, select, and obtain those things.

Blog mentions I’ve seen of FRBR at the ALA Midwinter conference that ended yesterday:

• Taking FRBR Further at The Dewey Blog, about the ALCTS session with lots of interesting people talking. I wish I’d been there. Someone suggested FRAR and FRSAR be renamed FRAD and FRSAD?
• Top Tech Trends, at the LITA Blog: “Is the promise of FRBR going to flesh out? ”
• Emerging Technology Interest Group at the LITA Blog again. Someone mentioned FRBRized displays. No details.

I’ll keep an eye peeled for others. Leave a link or trackback or something if you were at a session and wrote it up.

Clara Assunção is a Portugese librarian who wrote a dissertation about cataloguing music and in it discussed FRBR. She’s posted the abstract in English and Portuguese, and here’s the English version:

This study results from the knowledge of the insufficiency in standards and rules used for the identification and description of written musical documents. Enlightened by the new standard development, particularly the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and recent studies on the concept of a work and bibliographic relationships, it must achieve an equilibrium between the music cataloguing rules normally used on libraries, very generalist, and the rules usually used by musicologists for the description of the same documents, particularly RISM rules, very specific an inaccessible to a less specialized public. Some proposals are made in order to contribute to the handling of music by the current revisions of FRBR, ISBD(PM) and UNIMARC. The final result is intended to be a description model according to the practice and the spirit of library cataloguing, but detailed enough to result in a useful tool to musicians and musicologists. The model was tested in a sample of bibliographic records from the opera Lauriane, composed by Augusto Machado.

Last December, the Bibliographic Services Task Force of the University of California Libraries (a group under their Systemwide Operations and Planning Group (SOPAG!)) published a report titled Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California.

• Executive summary (112 KB PDF)
• Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California (396 KB PDF)

Other library bloggers have discussed this and the new NSCU catalogue together, for example Lorcan Dempsey in his post Thinking About the Catalog and Karen G. Schneider in The Revolution Will Be Folksonomied (where she says: “FRBR in a nutshell: a user shouldn’t be confused by multiple records for the same item”).

Here are the recommendations in report’s “Enhancing Search and Retrieval” category. I only quote the FRBR-related one in full, but the others are all explained in the full document.

I.1 Provide users with direct access to item

I.2 Provide recommender features

I.3 Support customization/personalization

I.4 Offer alternative actions for failed or suspect searches

I.5 Offer better navigation of sets of large results

I.5a: Implement FRBR concepts to present related works hierarchically, pulling together all records related to 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).

I.5b: Follow all of the linking fields in serial records to present all of the variant titles to users in a “family tree.”

I.5c: Implement faceted browsing based on sophisticated analysis of the contents of the records.

I.6 Deliver bibliographic services where the users are

I.7 Provide relevance ranking and leverage full-text

I.8 Provide better searching for non-Roman materials

That’s just part one of the list of recommendations. Go read the rest. They’re very good.

FRBR comes up throughout the report as one of the things that will make users’ lives easier, including in a use case and in this recommendation:

III.3 Manually enrich metadata in important areas

Manual metadata creation is by definition both expensive and time-consuming and is an activity that should judiciously be applied where it yields the most benefit. There are a number of areas where the application of intellectual effort in the creation of metadata justifies the high cost.

The enhancement of FRBR relationships through the manual addition or correction of name, main title, series titles, and uniform title, especially for prolific authors in the fields of music, literature, and special collections is one such area. The collocation of materials and the concomitant search and retrieval improvements in these fields more than justify the cost.

Additional attention to serials holdings would likewise have a major positive impact of effective search and retrieval. If serials holding were better structured, services to users would be much more reliable and major efficiencies could be reached through automated record matching and processing.

III.3a: RECOMMENDATION: Enhance name, main title, series titles, and uniform titles for prolific authors in music, literature, and special collections.

III.3b: RECOMMENDATION: Implement structured serials holdings format.

That’s a good line: “The collocation of materials and the concomitant search and retrieval improvements in these fields more than justify the cost.”

This report and the NCSU catalogue show that FRBR has become a basic part of new thinking about catalogues — overtly in the Group 1 (work, expression, manifestation, item) hierarchy that everyone wants to see, and more subtly in the way that the user tasks (find, identify, select, obtain) are helped by the other tools for searching and browsing that the catalogues have. I think this is great, and it’s all the more impressive given that it’s unknown what Resource Description and Access will end up looking like in the end, how authority records will work, if MARC and other standards will change, and so on. People are demanding FRBR, and making it work, before it’s fully settled. (It’ll be interesting to see how new implementations handle serials, collections and anthologies, and other forms of aggregates.) The number of RFPs mentioning FRBR will be increasing, I’m sure.

The new North Carolina State University library catalogue has been getting attention, and it deserves it. It’s good. Since it’s something new, some library bloggers have been rigorous with their testing and criticism because it can be compared to an ideal and not just the crummy real systems most of us have to use, but there’s no denying it’s far better than most OPACs, and it’s going to get better. I congratulate all the people who worked on it: well done!

As soon as I saw the OPAC, I wondered if they’d thought about FRBR and had any plans to use it. I e-mailed Andrew Pace, head of systems at the library, and he replied:

Yes, we thought about FRBR, and it is on our todo list (see more info at
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/). Endeca has a feature called record rollup that will cover this. We are mocking up the displays and determining what our matchpoint rules are, based on what LC, OCLC, and others are doing.

From the FAQ about Endeca on the site:

What are NCSU’s plans for future development?

What you see now is very much a version 1.0 of the new online catalog. NCSU will continue to refine currently available features:

• item and serial record displays
• relevance algorithms
• spell correction, thesaurus, and “did you mean…” functionality

As well as develop new features:

• record-rollup, a FRBR implementation to display expressions of the same work in one place
• thesaurus control of subject authority records
• better integration with or replacement of the Web2/Unicorn interface
• shopping cart functionality
• RSS and Web Services functionality

Emphasis mine. More about FRBR and library catalogues tomorrow.

A quote from a press release titled Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium sees a VITAL solution for their digital repository needs:

Blacksburg, VA — VTLS is proud to announce that the Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium has purchased VITAL as their solution to provide a digital/institutional repository.

Serving as a test site for the 2.1 version in their use of this new ground breaking product, they joined an elite group of institutions around the world. No other repository solution offers the combination of rich functionality, vendor supported open source components and powerful workflow and search tools.

The Universite has a long tradition of being a pioneer in the use of cutting-edge automation products, having served as one of the first libraries to use VIRTUA and later the first site to run a production version of FRBR.

I’m not sure what they mean by “the first site to run a production version of FRBR.” I went to Catalogue des Bibliothèques de l’UCL and searched and looked at some Alexandre Dumas books, but didn’t see anything FRBRish. My French isn’t that good, though. Perhaps one of you who reads French can investigate? Maybe it’s just vendor hype.

Here’s VTLS’s product information for VITAL.

Careful readers of the draft of Part I of Resource Description and Access (562 KB PDF) will have noticed a certain something missing between chapter two and chapter four: namely, chapter three. Don’t worry, now the draft of Part I Chapter 3 of RDA (320 KB PDF) is available for download and comment. It’s titled “Technical Description.” I mention it because RDA is FRBRish, but I think you can safely skip this part.

There’s another FRBR session at the ALA Midwinter conference: the ALCTS FRBR Implementers Group, meeting Friday 20 January (tomorrow) in the morning. I hope someone there posts some notes and links. Anyone know anything about this group?

The American Libary Association’s Midwinter conference is in San Antonio, Texas, this year; it starts tomorrow and runs to Wednesday. I know of at least one FRBR-related event, announced on some mailing lists by Nancy Chaffin of Coloradio State University:

Please attend the ALCTS CCS Cataloging & Classification Research Discussion Group meeting in San Antonio

When: Saturday, January 21, 2006

Time: 10:30-12:30

Where: Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center, Room 208

Speakers:

Glenn Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management, OCLC, will give us a short report on where the FRANAR-related work is taking us.

Lois Mai Chan and Ed. O’Neill will talk about the initial activities of the recently formed IFLA Working Group on Subject Authorities (FRASAR) and discuss the challenges for the Group 3 entities.

Tami Morse-McGill, Metadata Librarian at Colorado State University Libraries, will discuss the process she and Nancy Chaffin are developing for building a work key and testing the CSUL collection for FRBR-readiness.

Time will be allowed for questions and answers, followed by a business meeting for the discussion group.

Very interesting reports, but not everyone can make it to Texas! I hope the session gets blogged and commented on. Maybe the speakers will post their slides or notes. If you post something about this or another FRBR event, please let me know!

Jenn Riley (the Inquiring Librarian) presented a paper at a conference last year, and I just noticed it: Exploiting Musical Connections: A Proposal for Support of Work Relationships in a Digital Music Library (433 KB PDF). It was presented at ISMIR 2005: 6th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval.

ABSTRACT:

Musical works in the Western art music tradition exist in a complex, inter-related web. Works that are derivative or part of another work are common; however, most music information retrieval systems, including traditional library catalogs, don’t use these essential relationships to improve search results or provide information about them to end-users. As part of the NSF-funded Variations2 Digital Music Library project at Indiana University, we have developed a set of functional requirements defining how derivative and whole/part relationships between musical works should be acted upon in search results, and how these results should be displayed. This paper describes recent research into these relationships, provides examples why they are important in Western art music, outlines how Variations2 or any other music information retrieval system could use these relationships in matching user queries, and describes optimal displays of these relationships to end-users.

Naturally, she discusses FRBR. Variations2 has been mentioned here before; see that entry for links to papers and presentations about it.