The FRBR Blog

There’s a lot of talk going around about Web 2.0 and Library 2.0, but this isn’t about that, so don’t worry. Here’s some mail I sent to the FRBR mailing list last week:

Are there any plans, or is it expected that, FRBR will be revised? Next fall it will be ten years (!) since the final report was made. Since 1997 there have been implementations that have turned up difficulties with the model and as it’s become better known it’s been exposed to some good critical thought and applied in many different areas.

There are working groups on aggregates (which are hard to handle) and expressions (which cause confusion) and harmonization with CIDOC’s Conceptual Reference Model (which I think will lead to an object-oriented FRBR). Functional Requirements for Authority Records was out for comment and that group is thinking about them now, and Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records is underway. AACR is being turned into the FRBRish Resource Description and Access.

That’s a lot of work going on. When these groups have finished their work, will everything be brought together, all the problems resolved or at least clarified with suggested solutions, and something like FRBR 2.0 issued? The minutes of the August Review Group’s meeting in Oslo say, “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.” What’ll happen after that? I’m curious.

No-one replied, but if I do hear an answer, I’ll let you know. If you know, leave a comment!

I learned recently (I can’t remember who told me) that EBSCO has made their Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts database free for searching at www.librarysearch.com. Those of you with access to a large or specialized library probably already have it and much more, but for the rest, it’s a great resource. The URLs are incredibly ugly, and I won’t link directly to a search, but if you search for “frbr” then you get a list of 78 (as of today) FRBR-related papers.

The most recent is “The FRBR Model as Applied to Continuing Resources” by Ed Jones (Library Resources & Technical Services, 49 (4), October 2005), which I mentioned last month. Sorting results by date doesn’t work (!?) but the earliest I saw is “Multiple Versions Revisited”, by Edgar A. Jones (Serials Librarian, 32 (1/2), 1997). The abstract says, “Re-examines the multiple-versions problem in serials cataloging, with reference to the IFLA draft Functional Requirement of Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model.” Same fellow, I assume!

If you don’t have easy access to these journals, you’ll have to ask your local library to get a copy of an article through interlibrary loan or try to cadge a PDF from someone (preferably at a university). The database will be very useful, at least, for seeing who’s publishing what and what they’re talking about. It’s hard to stay connected when you don’t have access to where people are writing, and a lot of FRBR work is in expensive journals. Luckily, as you can see in the archives, some writers make free copies available, which is a boon to everyone. And much other interesting work and comment is on web sites, blogs, and mailing lists all over.

(Note: I denied all cookies that the site wanted to lay on me and everything still worked.)

David Bigwood, who runs Catalogablog (a blog about cataloguing, as you might guess), gave a talk about MARC tools at a conference last November. He put up a recording of it, as well as the text.

• Free MARC Tools (text)
• Free MARC Tools (page at Ourmedia.org with embedded audio file and metadata)
• Free MARC Tools audio recording (8.7 MB MP3, 15 minutes long)

He discusses the Library of Congress’s FRBR Display Tool starting a little after the seven minute mark. (Of course, if you’re interested in free MARC tools, you’ll want to hear all of it.)

The RDA-L mailing list, where people discuss the draft of the new set of cataloguing rules Resource Description and Access, has been getting regular traffic the last week or two, but while RDA is FRBR-influenced, nothing really FRBRy has come up yet. It’s mostly finicky stuff that only dedicated cataloguers will care about. When archives go up, I’ll link to anything of particular FRBRosity.

Dan Chudnov made a blog post on 1 January called On Borders, and said:

The answer was stated, if I’m not mistaken (sorry, I don’t have an exact reference, does anyone know?), at the turn of the 19th century, which makes it an unfulfilled, three-century-spanning statement of user requirements more potent than FRBR: that libraries must provide users with the ability to search and browse the whole bibliographic universe, and keep a locally-optimized subset of that universe close at hand….

That premise, the access to the whole bibliographic universe piece, is utterly unfulfilled in every library I know well today. In its place we manage barriers in information-space which evoke the same kinds of metaphors.

FRBR’s user tasks certainly handle the first half of that answer: find, identify, select, and obtain. The second half is beyond FRBR’s scope (it’s functional requirements for bibliographic records, after all). I don’t know what source he’s thinking of, but in the nineteenth century or now, that subset, no matter what you did with it, would have to be a small one. The bibliographic universe is large, but every library has a piece of it, specially arranged and optimized for its users, and what they don’t have, they can help you find.

New Frameworks for Resource Discovery and Delivery, by Judith Pearce with Janifer Gatenby, mentions FRBR: “The National Library of Australia plans to use FRBR to cluster related resources in the ANBD and to experiment with new technologies such as topic maps to exploit semantic relationships inherent in (or deducible from) the content being indexed.”

Sounds exciting! This page about Australian library databases says that the ANBD is “Australia’s largest single bibliographic resource with millions of entries for books, magazines and items in non-print or alternative print formats such as films, sound and video recordings (including captioned), maps, pictures, CDs, braille and talking books, music scores, computer files and electronic journals.” It has over 13,000,000 records for over 37,000,000 items. AustLit is a big project, and very well done, and this would carry on the work to a larger scale.

Late last year Dan Connolly of the W3C posted frbr:embodiment is enough without frbr:embodimentOf, no? after reading Ian Davis’s FRBR and RDF. There’s a link to this W3C Semantic Web wiki page about hasPropertyOf, which says, “Some ontologies, e.g. a FRBR ontology go so far as to coin pairs embodiment and embodimentOf.”

Further FRBR Applications, a blog post by OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey, notices a use for FRBR in a law prof’s thoughts about copyright: finding public domain manifestations of a work. That’s one of those manifestation-level attributes that could be important enough to be elevated up so it’s clearly visible to catalogue users when they’re browsing works. There are others: I don’t care if a book is hardcover or soft, but I’d only read large print as a last resort while others would always prefer it. If I want a movie, I need to know if it’s available on DVD, VHS, or some other format (and, if it’s an international catalogue, if my player can play it and my TV show it). If I wanted the electronic text of a book (e.g. Homer’s The Odyssey) so I could reuse it, I’d definitely want to know if there’s a version that’s out of copyright. Now, most people wouldn’t care about that, but we should let people customize the display so they can see the attributes that mean the most to them. “Save the time of the reader,” as the great Ranganathan said.

I added links to the FRANAR (Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records) and FRSAR (Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records) Working Groups to the Reference section on the left. They’re part of IFLA and very closely related to the FRBR Review Group (which used to be a Working Group, but after their report had been out for a while, they changed their nature). The FRANAR page will lead you to the draft of FRAR (Functional Requirements for Authority Records) that has been discussed here before. The FRSAR group was just formed in April 2005 and I’m not sure where they are in their work; all that’s on their web page right now is their terms of reference.

I’ll mention FRANAR/FRAR and FRSAR things here as they happen. By the way, if you haven’t read the FRAR draft, you should.

UPDATE: I added a link to the RDA home page, too.

I’ve been listening to audio recordings of presentations from the Access 2005 conference in Alberta. Lots of code4lib people were there, and the talks were really interesting and filled with great ideas and reports of fascinating work.

FRBR is mentioned briefly in Hackfest II Results (5.8 MB MP3), at about 04:20 minutes in. Someone (I’m not sure who) is describing a project they worked on: a MARC wiki. “We also saw this working as a bit of a FRBRization tool, so if you have a book, you know, what we really care about is the work, probably, so we would assign all the ISBNs for a particular work, so then we can start querying this thing and getting back ISBNs, ISSNs, you know, we could have ISSN concordance, that sort of thing as well.”

It’s the barest mention of FRBR, granted, but it deserves a mention. There’s nothing else FRBRy in the talks that I’ve heard, but I recommend looking them over and listening to a few.