The FRBR Blog

If you cast your minds back to 17 May, you’ll remember I mentioned Fernanda Moreno wrote a master’s thesis about FRBR (in Portuguese). It’s now available online: you can read about it on E-LIS or download it directly: Requisitos Funcionais para Registros Bibliográficos - FRBR: um estudo no catálogo da Rede Bibliodata (1.4 MB PDF). Even if you don’t know Portuguese (and I don’t), if you read English or a Romance language you’ll be able to get the gist of things.

Been wondering what’s happening with Resource Description and Access, the revised cataloguing rules? Outcomes of the Meeting of the Joint Steering Committee Held in Ottawa, Canada, 24-28 April 2006 was posted yesterday. The big news is that instead of coming in three parts (I, II, and III) it will come in two parts (A and B).

The portion of part A that deals with relationships will be issued for review according to the same timeframe as that determined for the former part II. It will cover: relationships between the FRBR group 1 entities (works, expressions, manifestations, and items); relationships between FRBR group 1 entities and FRBR group 2 entities (persons, families, corporate bodies); and, instructions for particular types of content, e.g., musical works, legal works, and religious works.

The structure of part A will allow for better alignment of chapters with the FRBR user tasks of find, identify, select, and obtain.

The people on the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (there’s a picture of them on the update — they look like a happy bunch) seem to be ploughing through lots of stuff. In a few weeks the next part of the draft of RDA will be out, along with more about the structure of the entire thing.

Thom Hickey did an interview with EDUCAUSE that was posted last week. FRBR comes up in the conversation at about the six- and eight-minute marks. The whole thing is certainly worth a listen.

I gave a guest lecture on FRBR last December to Joe Cox’s advanced cataloguing class at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto. It was recorded, but unfortunately the batteries died after 17 minutes and 33 seconds. I’m posting it here anyway, just for fun. You’ll have to imagine what the rest of the hour was like. The MP3 ends at an exciting point, just when I was about to explain expressions by distinguishing between two different translations of The Odyssey. The recording quality isn’t great; I think the background noise is the hum of the projector.

• the first 17 minutes of my lecture (14 MB MP3)
• the slides (210 KB PDF)
• the handout (167 KB PDF)

Musings on using xISBN in our Horizon catalog, sent by Ben Ostrowsky, is the first in a thread on the code4lib mailing list. You can catch the follow-ups on the May archives page.

Lorcan Dempsey posted FRBResque last Friday: “It is important to remember that wherever its (slow) formal elaboration goes, we do not currently have something called FRBR which can be implemented out of the box…. The main current advantage is the framework it gives us for thinking about developing work-based views which are ‘roughly right’.”

FRBR = IFLA + datamodellering is a recent blog post by Tord Høivik. It’s in Norwegian, so I can’t understand it, though I see he mentions Thomas Kuhn.

You may have heard about the new eXtensible Catalog (XC) that some people at the University of Rochester are cooking up. Those people are Ronald F. Dow (dean), David Lindahl (director of digital initiatives), Jennifer Bowen (head of cataloging) , and Nancy Fried (lead anthropologist). Lead anthropologist!

Jennifer Bowen is a name you’ll know from such articles as FRBR: Coming Soon to Your Library?. The FRBR aspect of XC is mentioned briefly in More on XC from David Lindahl, a short interview posted on the ACRL blog. He says one of the main goals of XC is to “investigate the benefits of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model in the context of a user centered design software project. We wanted to learn whether FRBR would address real end-user needs.”

They’re just getting started. I’ll report as things happen. Good luck to them!

Here’s a draft of a proposal of something called NeT-CEE: Network Tool for Collaborative Electronic Editing over the Internet, which “will enable geographically dispersed groups of humanists to collaborate on editions encompassing text, image, and annotations.” There’s an interesting mention of FRBR in the middle.

NeT-CEE will also support the Classical Text Services protocol (CTS) [64, 63] for organizing, referencing, and querying classical texts. The aim of the Classical Text Services protocol is to define a network service enabling use of a distributed collection of texts according to notions that are traditional among classicists. The CTS adopts and extends the hierarchical scheme of bibliographic entities defined by the OCLC’s and IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, or FRBR. FRBR describes bibliographic records in terms of a hierarchy of Works, each of which is realized through one or more Expressions, realized in turn through one or more Manifestations, realized through one or more Items. CTS implements this hierarchy using the traditional terms Work, Edition or Translation, and Exemplar, while extending the hierarchy upwards, grouping Works under a notional entity called “TextGroup” (corresponding to authors, in the case of literary texts, or any other traditional and useful corpus, such as “Attica” for inscriptions, or “Berlin” for a published corpus of papyri). CTS also extends FRBR’s hierarchy downwards, allowing identification and abstraction of citeable chunks of text (Homer, Iliad Book 1, Line 123), or ranges of citeable chunks (Hom. Il. 1.123-2.22). The CTS protocol allows sharing of information about texts at any level of the conceptual hierarchy, and allows retrieval of sections of an identified text at any hierarchical level supported by its scheme of citation.

I hadn’t heard of the Classical Text Services protocol before. Check out this example from A Guide to version 1.1 of the Classical Text Services Protocol:

So, for example, a TextInventory entry Homer could contain the following information:

TextGroup: tlg0012 (Homer, Homerus, Ὅμηρος)

Work: tlg001 (Iliad, Ilias, Iliade, Ἰλιάς)

Edition: 001 ( ed. T.W. Allen, Homeri Ilias, vols. 2-3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931.)

Edition: 002 (CHS-HMT Iliad, collated against Venetus A and Villoison.)

Online: filename = chs_Iliad_grc.xml

Translation: 001 (CHS-HMT baseline translation.)

Online: filename = chs_Iliad_en.xml

Work: tlg002 (Odyssey) &c

&c.

Very interesting!

Fernanda Passini Moreno sent me e-mail saying she’d recently finished her master’s thesis for the library school at the University of Brasilia. It’s not online, but here’s the English version of the abstract:

In the context of library studies and Information Science, descriptive representation a serie of specialist meetings trying to establish standards to bibliographic description. Originated by one of international meetings, FRBR - Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, published by International Federation of Library Association and Institutions IFLA in 1998, it started a new interpretation of the bibliographic records was introduced, reorganizing their elements and presenting concepts and definitions of entities, attributes and relationships. The study became reflexes of the model FRBR in an electronic catalog, on-line, nationwide, through the examination of bibliographic records in format Machine Readable Cataloging - MARC, in order to systematize the relationship between the elements. Using appropriate literature and characteristics regarding potentials to realize the study, had been selected registers according to Catálogo Coletivo da Rede Bibliodata (Bibliodata Network Public Collection Catalog), and characterizing a case study. To illustrated the reflex of the model on the records, was used the conversional tool, FRBR Display Tool, from Library of Congress (LC), and besides the use of auxiliary tools when was made necessary. In order to complete the study, a few issues encountered in the literature were brought back as a manner to reach the goal of systematizing the relationships, given the relative failure of the tool under this aspect. Analytics stages comprise sample registers, notoriously descriptive and of the register converted in document that contains register model. In this phase, that is impossible to discuss every case, some typical cases for each type of entitle purpose in FRBR. The results conducting to a necessity of register normalization and it is suggested tags MARC linking a better visualization of the model. Absence of discussions due to the use of models and international standards is considering as a potential trouble and there are paths indicated for the ways of future researches that would be realize, and one contribution to construct theorist corpus of the area.