The FRBR Blog

Julie Allinson dropped me a note about an interesting project she’s working on. Eprints Application Profile desribes a plan to develop “a Dublin Core Application Profile for describing scholarly publications (eprints) held in institutional repositories.”

A page simply titled Model is a plan for representing all of these eprints, and it’s based on FRBR, with some adaptations to suit their purposes. Here’s something they’re pondering:

Issue: it is not clear whether the Powerpoint slides used to present a paper at a conference or workshop should be modelled as an Expression of the ScholarlyWork or as a new ScholarlyWork (i.e. as a separate work). If they are modelled sepearately, then it is likely that we will need a Work to Work relationship to capture the relation between a ‘publication’ ScholarlyWork and a ‘presentation’ ScholarlyWork.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops, how they handle all the problems particular to eprints, and then how it’s implemented.

UPDATE: Corrected spelling of Allinson’s last name on 4 February 2007. Sorry!

Ben Ostrowsky posted An Interesting Idea for Using xISBN Information last week. He was (as so many of us do) chatting about FRBR with a friend and explained about OCLC’s xISBN service. The friend asked, “Now the question is … can a patron place a hold for the entire cluster? Say, a child who has been assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird and doesn’t care which edition?”

Ostrowsky shows how this doesn’t work: in particular, all the different translations are bunched together, and there’s a big difference between not caring whether you get the latest paperback version of a book or the printing from ten years ago and not caring whether you get the original English version or a translation into an other (any other) language.

With a fully FRBRized catalogue, this will be easy to do. xISBN is an excellent tool, but it only groups manifestations into works. It doesn’t know about the expressions. The kid who wants To Kill a Mockingbird wants the original English text, but that probably isn’t the way he or she would think about it. (In the Harry Potter example I had the original expression separated from all of the translations so it’s easier to see what’s what.) The kid basically wants a button that says “Get me this book.” “This book” means a regular-sized print verson. If that isn’t available, as Ostrowsky says, the system could fall back to other manifestations (large print) or other expressions (audiobooks, or translations) or even other works (the movie version).

This is a good demonstration of the levels of detail that we can show to users and how that’s more than they usually care about. I’ll do more about this in another Harry Potter example.

“FRBR/CRM harmonization” has been underway for a while. That’s a project to bring together FRBR and the Conceptual Reference Model of the Committee on Documentation of the International Council of Museums. It will present FRBR as an object-oriented model instead of the entity-relationship model used in the Final Report.

Patrick Le Boeuf announced that a draft of the FRBR/CRM report was done. It’ll be available publicly soon. I don’t know exactly when, but I’ll certainly post a link to it here.

The spring 2006 issue of CONSERline has a section on FRBR:

Our opportunities as serials specialists include working with developers of new systems to make use of FRBR for accurately displaying serial “families” of related serials and formats. The very thought provoking program on serials and FRBR at NASIG provided many ideas on how FRBR can be used to think through relationships between serials and displaying them to users, but more work is needed with its application to serials in evolving systems.

Regina Reynolds (LC) and Diane Boher (NLM) are co-chairs of the PCC group that developed basic record requirements for a serial in any format using FRBR user tasks. As part of the access level record for serials project, the group developed cataloging guidelines aimed at reducing redundancies, making fuller use of system-display capabilities, and providing for the possibility of vendor or publisher supplied data being added to records at a later time. A pilot study was conducted involving 13 institutions to compare records created at the access level with those created at a fuller level.

There’s more, with some links. CONSER works on cataloguing serials. Related link: CONSER Task Group on FRBR and Continuing Resources.

The draft of Resource Description and Access Part A Chapters 6 and 7 (626 KB PDF) is now available! See the announcement page for full details. Chapter 6 is “Related Resources” and covers relationships between things. I haven’t read it yet but it looks like it provides a nice set of rules for dealing with the sorts of things we saw in the Lord of the Rings challenge, where all kinds of works were related to other works in complicated ways. Lots of relationships are described in the FRBR Final Report, but there are more in RDA here. (Notice it talks about works and expressions, too.) I’ll be summarizing the challenge soon and then maybe I’ll take a stab at using RDA rules to describe all the relationships. Chapter 7 is “Persons, Families, and Corporate Bodies Associated with a Resource,” or, in FRBR terms, Group 2 entities.

All this is being done by the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, and they’ve put their working documents online.

(Announcement of this seen on the AUTOCAT mailing list.)

This popped up on my screen: A 21st Century Look at an Ancient Concept: Understanding FRBR (direct link to the 2.6 MB PDF), a conference presentation by Anita Coleman, given in Arizona on 2 December 2004. Have a look at pages 34-36, which have a fresh view of the work-expression-manifestation-item hierarchy. There’s some interesting-looking material in the slides about scientific models, but not enough for me to make out what she talked about.

The program for the 2006 CIDOC
(Committee on Documentation of the International Council of Museums) conference lists some FRBR-related activities. The program is in a tiny little box and hard to read on my web browser, but it may look better on yours. There will be talk about the FRBR-CRM harmonization that Patrick Le Boeuf and others have been working on.

I mentioned this before but since it’s my national library association I’ll point it out again: today there’s a FRBR session at the Canadian Library Association conference in Ottawa:

Friday, June 16, 2006 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

47. Demystifying FRBR and FRAR

Are FRBR and FRAR related? Find out all about the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and the new Functional Requirements for Authority Records. What is each of them about? How are they interrelated? How were they developed? Discuss their implications for library systems. Participants will learn: What FRBR and FRAR are; and the status of ongoing work in this area.

Speaker: Tom Delsey, Consultant, Thomas J. Delsey Consulting, Ottawa, ON

This session will be of interest to: Technical services and systems librarians

If you’re at the CLA and reading this while wondering how to plan your day, you should go. If you do go, leave a comment and tell the rest of us what happened!

Tim Spalding at LibraryThing introduces thingISBN, an equivalent OCLC’s xISBN. If you give it an ISBN it will return a list of the ISBNs of all of the other manifestations it knows of for the same work. The difference is that where OCLC has smart people making complicated algorithms that run on WorldCat, LibraryThing uses the decisions made by all its users when they group things together into works. Don’t miss Spalding’s blog entry about this.

Will Wikipedia lead to a large, open FRBR implementation?

From Wikicat, written by Wikipedia user Jleybov:

Wikicat is the bibliographic catalog used by the Wikicite and WikiTextrose projects. It will be implemented as a Wikidata dataset using a datamodel design based upon IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), the various ISBD standards, the Library of Congress’s MARC 21 specification, and the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules‘ The Logical Structure of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules.

The page describes the four FRBR Group 1 entities with a familiar illustration and some examples. The Wikicat Technical Design page has more.

Wikipedia’s making a big push to add citations and sources to all its articles. That’s a massive citation database, much of which will have its own Wikipedia pages: authors, books, periodicals, etc. FRBR can be of great use in organizing it all. Another non-library project that sees how useful FRBR can be! Since it’s a Wikipedia project it’s open to anyone, so if you’re interested, get involved.