The FRBR Blog

FRBR, and the search engine Endeca, turn up in the minutes of a web committee at Bryn Mawr, the American women’s university where Katharine Hepburn and Edna Krabappel studied: “We briefly discussed FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), a potential solution for displaying catalog search results in a hierarchical order, although there are concerns whether this will ever be a realistic option.”

Here’s something interesting from the LibraryThing blog, 25 February: ‘Twas the Night Before LibraryThing. A user, _Celeste_, has entered 107 different versions of Clement Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas, better known as The Night Before Christmas.

Here’s the work The Night Before Christmas on LibraryThing. Notice all the covers on the left. Moore wrote a poem, and different illustrators have taken it on and done art for it, thus providing their own complementary (“so closely connected to the other work in the relationship that it has little value outside the context of that other work“) referential (“intended to be combined with or inserted into the related work“) works. All those covers are covers of manifestations of aggregate works combining Moore’s poem with an artist’s drawings or paintings.

There are other derivative works, such as A Fisherman’s Night Before Christmas, by Shauna Mooney Kawasaki, and they’ve all been tagged with nb4x (as in “night before Xmas”). In a fully FRBRized catalogue the relationship these books have to the original poem would be indicated. Meanwhile, _Celeste_ is using LibraryThing in an inventive way to do what she can. Not many users care about this level of detail, but _Celeste_ does, having much more complicated bibliographic needs. She has to use the n4bx tag to represent different sorts of entity relationships

Here’s how Open WorldCat handles some of the manifestations. It includes Garfield’s Night Before Christmas, by Clement Moore and Jim Davis, with the other straight illustrated versions of the poem. I wonder if Davis just did the illustrations, in which case it fits, or if he rewrote it, in which case I think OCLC”s algorithm is a bit too inclusive.

From Invitation to: World-Wide review of ISBD(A): International Standard Bibliographic Description for Older Monographic Publications (Antiquarian) 2006 revision:

In the early 1990s, IFLA’s Division of Bibliographic Control set up a Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). Following adoption of the Study Group’s recommendations, the ISBD Review Group was charged to initiate a full-scale review of the ISBDs. The objective of this project was to ensure conformity between the provisions of the ISBDs and FRBR’s data requirements for the “basic level national bibliographic record” (BLNBR).

… Therefore, the main task in pursuing this revision project has entailed a close examination of the ISBD data elements that are mandatory to make optional those that are also optional in FRBR. (In no case is a data element mandatory in FRBR but optional in the ISBDs.)

The draft of the new revision is available and comments are accepted until 1 May 2006.

Thursday morning at the Computers in Libraries 2006 conference, Lorcan Dempsey gave a talk called “Exploiting the Value of Structured Metadata.” Among much else, he showed off a demo of the new FictionFinder, which will go live next month, and mentioned FRBR. It was copiously blogged. Compare and contrast the following notes:

• Jason Clark at the LITA Blog: CIL 2006 – Structured Data, Web 2.0, Libraries
• Karen Coombs at Library Web Chic: Structured Data, Web 2.0, Libraries
• David Lee King: Lorcan Dempsey: Structured Data, Web 2.0, Libraries
• Marydee Ojala at the Information Today blog: Exploiting the Value of Metadata
• Christina Pikas at Christina’s Library Rant: CIL2006: Notes from Thursday Morning
• G. Sandler, a school librarian in New York state: CIL2006 Thursday report
• Michael Sauers at the Travelin’ Librarian: CIL2006: Exploiting the Value of Structured Metadata
• A Talis person on the shared Panlibus blog: CIL2006 – Lorcan Dempsey on Structured Data, Web 2.0 and Libraries

Then on Friday, Roy Tennant and Andrew Pace mentioned FRBR in a session called “Catalogs/OPACs for the Future,” and it got blogged (with probably more to come):

• Geoff Harder at Blog Driver’s Waltz: CIL3.2 The Future of Catalogs: Roy Tennant and Andrew Pace
• Tom Pace on the ALA TechSource Blog: Measuring My First CIL
• Talis’s Panlibus again: Roy Tennant and Andrew Pace on the Future of Catalogues
• Christina Pikas: CIL 2006: Notes from Friday Morning

From Christina Pikas’s Friday morning notes: “You know how libraries are all bent around the axel about FRBR? NCSU asked Endeca and gave a long explanation of what they meant – Endeca said, oh yeah, product rollup, that’s easy. They do this all the time like for a clothing store where they’ll put the purple shirts with the pink of the same cut.”

I don’t think anything like this happened a year ago. Next year, I hope there will be good, large implementations being shown, and not just from OCLC.

It’s a short trip around the shores of Lake Ontario from FRBR Blog Headquarters to McMaster University, where they’ve linked to an OCLC WorldCat FRBR Pilot Project going on until the end of the month. I don’t have access to FirstSearch so I’m not sure what’s up.

• Lorcan Dempsey: FRBR Presentations, a prequel, listing related presentations online.
• Ed Summers: Reading 2.0, about the event. “It’s refreshing to see library technologies/concepts such as OpenURL, OCOinS, OAI-PMH, FRBR, METS and Dublin Core starting to be talked about in the context of a larger information environment.” I heartily agree. The particular interest of this blog is FRBR, of course, and the more search engines and Web 2.0 people and such hear about it, the better. It’s got to spread outside library catalogues, and it is.
• LISNews.org: Top 1000 Library Books, Updated, more collateral linking thanks to Dempsey’s talk. Someone was inspired to include many quotes from Plutarch in the comments. The comments in the O’Reilly Radar post Top 1000 Books in Library Collections are more interesting.

All the excitement of the FRBR Challenge left me rather enervated, but my summary of it will be posted soon.

Lorcan Dempsey spoke last Thursday at the Reading 2.0 confab in San Francisco. You can get his Power Point slides, linked from his blog and read about his talk and the others, on the O’Reilly Radar blog. It looks like a great talk, and one part of it made quite an impression: links to OCLC’s Top 1000 Works are turning up all over the place. Tim O’Reilly talked about it on the Radar blog.

Four people did the hard work of FRBRizing things related to The Lord of the Rings so we could see how well FRBR handles a large, complicated, interrelated set of things one might find in a library. Thanks to all of them! I randomly selected winners, and they are:

• FIRST PRIZE: Kelly Brown wins a Nancy Pearl Librarian Action Figure, a copy of Out On the Rim by Ross Thomas (40 KB PDF), and an S.R. Ranganathan button.
• SECOND PRIZE: Everett Meadors wins a copy of Gone, No Forwarding by Joe Gores and a Ranganathan button.
• THIRD PRIZE: Sarah Elliott wins a Ranganathan button.
• HONOURABLE MENTION: Jennifer Greig also wins a Ranganathan button!

Winners, please e-mail me your postal addresses and I’ll get your prizes in the mail soon. Play with your dolls, read your books, and wear your pins with honour. I’ll summarize the entries and the challenges they pose to FRBR in an entry later this week.

Who knows what the 2007 FRBR Challenge will bring? If there is one. Who knows what 2007 will bring?

Entries are flooding in and I now have two! Remember, there are three prizes that will be randomly awarded (look back at earlier posts for the details), so if one more of the 6.5 billion people on the planet enters, he or she will also be guaranteed a prize.

In the meantime, please contemplate the complexity of FRBRizing the four-DVD set of the special edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), directed by Peter Jackson. Here’s a review of it that lists the contents. Included are:

• The movie itself, split over two DVDs. There are four commentary tracks.
• Disc 3: Short documentaries and things about preparation for the movie: “J.R.R. Tolkien–Creator of Middle-Earth,” “From Book to Script,” “Storyboards and Pre-Viz: Making Words Into Images,” “Designing Middle-Earth,” “Weta Workshop,” “Costume Design,” “Early Storyboard Sequence: The Prologue,” “Abandoned Storyboard Sequence: Orc Pursuit Into Lothlorien,” “Abandoned Storyboard Sequence: Sarn Gebir Rapids Chase,” “Pre-Viz Animatic: Gandalf Rides to Orthanc,” “Pre-Viz Animatic: The Stairs of Khazad-dum,” “Storyboard to Film Comparison: Nazgul Attack at Bree,” “Pre-Viz to Film Comparison: The Bridge of Khazad-dum,” “Bag End Set Test,” “Middle-Earth Atlas” (an interactive map), “New Zealand as Middle-Earth.”
• Disc 4: Even more documentaries and things, about the making of the movie and after. I won’t list everything.

How would one specify all the works, expressions, and manifestations involved here? All the relationships? Take an unused storyboard sequence (a storyboard being a series of sketches showing how something will be filmed and how it will look on screen). People took the screenplay and made storyboards, including a sequence about Orcs chasing people into Lothlorien. The sequence is a series of drawings on paper. The drawings were digitized and reproductions of the digitizations stored on DVD. They are on a DVD containing many other related short documentaries and maps and things, and that DVD is one of a set of four in a box. The sequence didn’t make it into the movie, so it’s different from the storyboard sequences that were filmed and used. That’s a lot of different kinds of entities, lots of relationships, and a lot of confusion from looking at a complicated aggregate and not having any rules to follow. I hope the aggregates working group will eventually help with this kind of thing.

A good question for a cataloguing course’s final exam would be to show the contents of a special edition DVD like this and ask students to sketch out as many entities and relationships as they can.

The 2006 FRBR Challenge closes tomorrow at 23:59:59 Eastern Standard Time, and since there are three prizes and only one entrant so far, you stand a good chance of winning a prize. In the meantime, here’s another example:

• Work: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the 2001 movie directed by Peter Jackson movie.
• Expression: The original theatrical 178 minute release, with Spanish subtitles.
• Manifestation: The 2002 video cassette release from New Line Home Entertainment.
• Item: The copy owned by the Parliament branch of the Toronto Public Library.
• Relations: As a work, it’s related to Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, and also to The Two Towers because I think some events from the start of that book are moved into this movie. It has sequels, of course: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). There are two sets of expressions of the movie, I think: the ones based on the original theatrical release and the ones based on the 208-minute special extended edition. The DVD special editions make a very complicated FRBR set because of all of the extras and commentaries and costume design sketches and such. The movie’s musical score was released separately, and formed part of a symphony, and there are lots of other relations that could be listed, including the movie tie-in edition of the book mentioned in the last post.

FRBRily, what are the differences between the movie on video with Spanish subtitles and the movie on DVD with optional Spanish subtitles? With the audio option turned so that the Spanish dubbed audio track plays?

It’s not too late to enter. Leave your entry in a comment!