The FRBR Blog

At the OCLC Members Council held earlier this week, Lorcan Dempsey (and Thom Hickey) talked about libraries and Web 2.0 (57 MB MP3). It’s an interesting talk, as you’d expect, and at the 18 minute mark they talk about (and demo) a new version of FictionFinder that’ll go live within weeks. Naturally Dempsey mentions FRBR.

Thanks to OCLC for putting this recording on their podcast feed.

UPDATE: I forgot to point out Lorcan Dempsey’s blog and Thom Hickey’s blog.

Nichole _____ left a comment pointing out an entry she made on her blog: FRBR Comes to LibraryThing?! In it she comments on some work going on at Library Thing, explained here by Tim Spalding: Work Disambiguation and the "Ship of Theseus".

The former system was essentially composed of discrete books. If two books had very similar authors and titles (eg., two editions of Romeo and Juliet) , the system guessed that they were the same “work.” These guesses were pretty good—particularly considering they had to be made on the fly—but not good enough. And there was no way to change them. Notably, the whole system operated without a separate “works” database. This was clever and economical, but also limited.

The new system introduces a robust concept of “work.” On the database side this means a special “works” database, where each work has a title (the most common title of books belonging to the work). It is the way whereby most LibraryThing books can acquire LCCNs, Deweys and other cataloging information. It will allow users to discuss books—for example, on a forum—without worrying that they were only talking to people who had the same edition they did. Techies will like that it opens the door to an external API, relying on Library of Congress data, not Amazon data, which is forbidden. And, most importantly, it will allow ordinary people to participate in the sacred act of cataloging, combining and splitting books from works as they see fit. This has never before been done before. It’s Wikipedia for book cataloging.

There’s no mention of FRBR, and I’m going to e-mail Spalding to ask if he’s going to use it. I’m eager to see this at work and find out more about how he’s designed it.

(This may remind you of an aside made at an Access 2005 talk last year, too.)

Diane Hillmann, a major figure in the Dublin Core and metadata world (she wrote Using Dublin Core, for example) is on the RDA-L mailing list, and sent some very interesting mail there on 6 February 2006. I can’t point to archives yet, so I’ll give a couple of extended quotes and replies. In one part of her mail, she said:

Transcription as Identification

In the world of traditional cataloging and static published resources, the notion of consistent transcription as an important method to assure predictable access, from a variety of agencies handling exactly the same resources, made a great deal of sense.

However, digital resources carry no such assumption of stability-change is part of the package. In that environment, relying on use of consistently transcribed information as the primary method of identifying a resource makes much less sense. Resources in this environment are most often unique, and usually identified by a numeric or alpha-numeric string. In traditional cataloging, such identifiers are also used, of course: ISSNs and ISBNs are the most obvious examples, but they are generally not the primary identification of the resource.

Hal Cain of the Joint Theological Library in Australia replied two days later, and said to this:

The latest issue of LRTS has just arrived, here in the Antipodes, and I find Ed Jones’s article on FRBR constructs in relation to the realities of serials (er, continuing resources) extremely enlightening.

Jones invites us to consider whether stability or change in the *name* of a resource is the most appropriate way of determining whether it’s the *same* resource (to be described in a single record accomodating the changes) or, as under AACR2 following Paris Principles, a change in name must be taken to denote a different, separately described, resource. Though Jones does not address the question of change of title meaning a change of name in successive editions of a monographic resource, I wonder about the maintenance of AACR2 25.B, which in effect demands that revisions issued under a different title be treated as separate, related works. Is such complexity supportable in the limited environment of an online catalogue display and linking mechanisms?

Further on in her e-mail, Hillmann said:

Reproductions

I brought up the issue of reproductions on the RDA-L list and was dismayed to see how many catalogers were still trying to make the case for describing an original and a reproduction on the same record. If FRBR is truly underlying RDA, I believe this bullet must be bitten firmly and these practices explicitly marginalized within the context of the rules. In an environment where metadata of different formats created using different rules (or no rules) must be shareable, these residual practices keep us all from benefiting from our common enterprise.

Yes, it is certainly true that most vendor systems do not display multiply versioned resources acceptably, but we undercut the usefulness of our data by manipulating it to overcome system inadequacies; rather, we should address those problems with our vendors.

Cain replied to the first paragraph:

Yes, yes! But FRBR is a set of leaky containers: to make its application in RDA watertight, we have to make decisions, and *apply* those decisions *consistently*: how do we distinguish between “work” and “expression”; is cataloguing to be based *absolutely* on description, access, relating and controlling the *manifestation* — and does *item* really correspond with a user’s (temporary) on-screen display of a resource from a remote server which is a mirror of a “parent” resource, the attributes of which are affected by the platform (hardware and software, e.g. which browser) used and by the extent of access permitted; and– So far I don’t think we’ve agreed about the shape of the containers; Ed Jones in his recent LRTS article on continuing resources in relation to FRBR makes it clear how much has yet to be settled, maybe redesigned.

“FRBR is a set of leaky containers” — Hal Cain, 2006. A memorable quote.

While checking in on what people have tagged with ‘frbr’ at del.icio.us, I saw two Russian web pages I hadn’t come across before. They’re both at the GPNTB, the Gosudarstvennaya publichnaya nauchno-tehnicheskaya biblioteka Rossii, or Russian National Public Library for Science and Technology.

• МИНИСТЕРСТВО НАУКИ И ТЕХНОЛОГИЙ, which is in a Windows Cyrillic character set I can’t display, so all I see are some English words like “FRBR” and “expression.”
• http://ellib.gpntb.ru/ntb/2004/11/ntb_11_3_2004.htm, which I think is a Russian translation of Maja Žumer and Gerhardt Riesthuis’s paper “Consequences of Implementing FRBR: Are We Ready to Open Pandora’s Box?” (Knowledge Organization 29 (2), 2002).

FRBR in Russian is ФРБР.

I noticed a presentation at the 2005 ALA Midwinter that deserves a link. (I found it by checking on the FRBR tag at Delicious.)

John Espley, from the library system vendor VTLS, gave a presentation called FRBR and ERM: A Vendor’s Perspective (1 MB Power Point) at the Codified Innovations: Data Standards and Their Useful Applications session. The second half is about electronic resources management (subscription and access information to online journals). The first half, about FRBR, discusses continuing resources, in this case Atlantic Monthly and its name changes over the years, with lots of screenshots showing how its bibliographic history can be organized. On the conclusion slide one of his points is about “super works,” but as I recall the FRBR people have come down pretty strongly against this, saying that there are many groups of works, and lots of relationships between the works, but we shouldn’t confuse things by adding another level to the hierarchy and talking about super works. The Working Group on Aggregates will clear this up.

The Bibliographic Services department at York University Libraries has a weblog: York Libraries Bib Blog, for “news, happenings and information” of interest to them. Sunday’s post FRBR: A Brief Introduction is just what it says it is.

Bruce D’Arcus posted A Model for Citation Metadata last week: “I’ve been saying for awhile we need a solid and widely accessible bibliograpic data model for citations, and finally just decided to write one myself.”

You can read what he’s got so far on Sourceforge: Citation Oriented Bibliographic Vocabulary. You’ll notice a number of mentions of FRBR and a frbr namespace, for example the statement that biblio:person is equivalent to frbr:person. D’Arcus says:

One of the nice things about OWL is that not only can I define classes and subclasses, and then annotate them with text, but I can also make statements about how my classes relate to other classes. For people in the library world, the interesting equivalences I’ve drawn here are to the new FRBR RDF vocabulary. I have made the primary biblio:Reference class a subclass of frbr:Manifestation. This would allow descriptions encoded in my more grounded vocabulary to be placed in the context of a wider and more general FRBR view as needed.

Brad Eden of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas is doing an issue of Library Technology Reports later this year (42 (6)) titled “Report on FRBR.” It’ll be out around Christmas, and you’ll be hearing about it before then, so there’s no rush on putting reminders in your calendar. I asked Brad Eden what he has planned, and he said he “will provide a bibliography of resources, and will probably focus on access to catalogs and other implementations of FRBR that are currently available out there.” Who knows what interesting implementations will come along in 2006!

FRBR for Everyone is a webinar on 22 May 2006. It’s 1.5 hours long and costs $100 USD. It’ll cover FRBR, catalogues using it, and what lies ahead. Seems rather expensive to me.

Another day, another link to an OCLC blogger. Thom Hickey posted Levels of FRBR yesterday. He discusses how much energy it takes to implement FRBR and the problem of showing results to users clearly and understandably. These are two key questions.

At the high end you get specialized databases such as AustLit, the Australian literature catalog (which unfortunately you need a log-in to use), where they’ve gone to a lot of work to make sure they know who everyone is and understand the different editions of an author’s work. Just below that there are systems like FictionFinder here at OCLC that work with existing bibliographic information, but do extensive processing of the data to come as close as possible to a real FRBR understanding of the records.