The FRBR Blog

Exciting news about the expression entity! First, recall that the Working Group on the Expression Entity is a sub-group of the FRBR Review Group, the IFLA committee that is officially responsible for FRBR. The Expression Working Group has just released a draft of its proposed changes to the FRBR Final Report. The changes are meant to clear up some problems and confusion with the definition of an expression.

• Proposed changes to the FRBR text regarding expressions: clean copy (31 KB PDF)
• Proposed changes to the FRBR text regarding expressions: marked-up copy (with removed text and new text both clearly indicated) (32 KB PDF)

If you want to comment on the draft, you have until the end of the year. Pat Riva sent me the official announcement:

Invitation to participate: World-wide review of revisions to FRBR
section 3.2.2, definition of the entity expression.

You are invited to comment on the attached document as part of a
world-wide review. Comments are due by December 31, 2006

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records final report was
published by IFLA in 1998. As the FRBR conceptual model is intended to
be enhanced and revised when needed, the Cataloguing Section established
the FRBR Review Group in 2003 with a formal mandate which includes
responsibility for revisions to FRBR. This world-wide review is for the
first revision to FRBR to be prepared.

One area that has led to much discussion is the meaning of the group 1
entity expression. As a result of the issues raised, the FRBR Review
Group at its meeting in Berlin in 2003 created the Working Group on the
Expression Entity, chaired by Anders Cato, Royal Library, Stockholm,
Sweden which was charged with the task of clarifying the application of
the entity expression. The Working Group held formal meetings at IFLA
conferences from 2004 to 2006 and prepared revisions to the 1998 text of
FRBR section 3.2.2 (pp.18-20) which defines the entity expression.
Examples have been edited for consistency on pages 21 and 59 as well.
Formal world-wide review of the resulting proposed revision is invited
as the definition of an entity is significant to the model.

The main differences are:

• Removal of the stipulation that very slight modifications necessarily signal that a manifestation represents a new expression,
• Treatment of augmentations as expressions of their own separate works,
• More careful phrasing relating to musical performances as expressions,
• Explicitly acknowledging that cataloguing agencies will make operational decisions on expression boundaries.

The Working Group and the Review Group will consider all comments
received. A final version will be presented to the Review Group for a
vote, and if approved, will be presented to the IFLA Cataloguing Section
Standing Committee for a vote of approval.

Please send all comments, on or before December 31, 2006, to:

Pat Riva
(Chair, FRBR Review Group)
Library Technical Services
McGill University
3459 McTavish Street
Montreal, Quebec, Canada  H3A 1Y1
tel: +1-514-398-4790
fax: +1-514-398-8919
email: pat.riva@mcgill.ca

and

Anders Cato
(Chair, Working Group on the Expression Entity)
Kungl. Biblioteket
Department for Collection Development & Documentation
Head, The National Bibliography, monographs
Box 5039
S-102 41 Stockholm
Sweden
tel:  +(46) 8 463 44 29
fax:  +(46) 8 463 40 04
email:  anders.cato@kb.se

Stephen Hearn reviewed FRBR: Hype or Cure-All? (the special FRBR issue of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly edited by Patrick Le Boeuf) in Library Resources and Technical Services 50: 3, July 2006. He concludes, “The volume under review does a good job of bringing to the surface many of the issues being debated in the FRBR discussion… Perhaps the best answer to the question posed in the volume’s subtitle is that FRBR is neither hype nor cure-all, but still a work in progress.”

Library schools are back in session and I’m pleased to see that professors are assigning articles about FRBR. It’s not uncommon for students to have to post their reviews or critiques on a blog, either. It looks like someone assigned Stefan Gradmann’s “rdfs:frbr: Towards an Implementation Model for Library Catalogs Using Semantic Web Technology” to a class and they blogged it below. The anchor texts are quotes from the reviews. I think it’s an odd paper to assign to an introductory class, and the blog posts reflect that.

• More standards and rules… just what every cataloger wants and needs.
• [The paper] brilliantly illustrates the fact that I don’t know anything about hardware or networking or the actual structures that support the Internet
• That sounds great, I guess, after I Googled FRBR and figured out what the bleep he was talking about.
• However, many have concerns about censorship and Semantic Web.
• In Gradmann’s native Germany, or among EU nations in general, people (i.e., taxpayers) might support the concept of expending public funds for such a long range goal.
• I had a pretty hard time understanding this article as I have no practical experience with FRBR (and I had to Google it to find out that it is, in fact, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) or Semantic Web technology.
• After reading his article, I did go straight to Amazon and add some XML tutorial books to my wishlist :}
• If information professionals cannot even follow the standards, why have information standards in the first place? I believe we must start making a way for more standardization on the Internet. If not us, then who, if not now, when?
• I’m no dummy, but I honestly think that the first two pages of “rdfs:frbr – Towards an Implementation Model for Library Catalogs Using Semantic Web Technology” by Stefan Gradmann melted by brain.

In July there was a conference at Mississippi State University about e-journals, and the presentations are described on NASIG’s blog. Kristin Antelman gave a talk called “The FRBR Frontier: Applying a New Bibliographic Model to E-Resources:”

In her presentation “The FRBR Frontier: Applying a New Bibliographic Model to E-Resources,” Kristen Antelman, Associate Director for the Digital Library at North Carolina State University, provided an overview of how the principles of the FRBR model have the potential to enhance the means through which users search a library’s information retrieval system in order to locate and access e-resources. Antelman discussed current perspectives on the applicability of FRBR to continuing resources and explored some of the concepts associated with seriality in FRBR, including aggregates and the “superwork.”

Three brief status reports have been posted on the IFLA web site. I presume these were presented at their annual conference last month.

• FRBR Review Group Status Report of Activities, 2005-2006 (1.5 pages, 97 KB PDF): Pat Riva’s summary of what they’ve been doing over the last year.
• Working Group on the Expression Entity, Report of Activities 2005-2006 (1 page, 93 KB PDF): they’re still working on things, but nothing’s been made public.
• Working Group on Teaching and Training, Report of Activities 2005-2006 (1 page, 53 KB PDF): they want to disband.

Cathy Weng and Jia Mi have a paper, Towards Accessibility to Digital Cultural Materials: A FRBRized Approach (update: the title given says “An FRBRized,” but it’s a typo) in OCLC Systems & Services 22:3.

Design/methodology/approach – Different categories of digital collections based on guidelines defined by the authors are presented. Issues related to public access are illustrated. A model using the FRBR entities relationships is proposed to improve the accessibility of digital cultural materials so that scholarly research can be enhanced. The number of digital collections has been increased significantly since the late 1990s, but few studies investigated how these collections were organized and managed. To attain an understanding of the current status of institutional digital collections, various collection sites were examined and analyzed. The study focused on the existence and level of richness of bibliographic descriptions provided for each image; whether a search engine was available or not; how easily the search could be performed; and how search results were organized. The presentation of search results is problematic. Applying the IFLA FRBR model to digital materials can bring a solution.

Findings – The IFLA FRBR model presents the search results hierarchically so that related materials can be easily collocated. This feature meets the end-users needs. The attributes of work and expression entities presented in the IFLA FRBR model should be applied differently for event-based digital cultural materials. Defining work- or expression-level entities under the event or theme will be more logical than under author and/or title for cultural materials. Doing expression-level cataloging might also work for this type of materials.

Trond Aalberg, Frank Berg Haugen, and Ole Husby have a paper up (behind a pay-wall, sadly): A Tool for Converting from MARC to FRBR.

Abstract: The FRBR model is by many considered to be an important contribution to the next generation of bibliographic catalogues, but a major challenge for the library community is how to use this model on already existing MARC-based bibliographic catalogues. This problem requires a solution for the interpretation and conversion of MARC records, and a tool for this kind of conversion is developed as a part of the Norwegian BIBSYS FRBR project. The tool is based on a systematic approach to the interpretation and conversion process and is designed to be adaptable to the rules applied in different catalogues.

There’s more on this undated page also called A Tool for Converting from MARC to FRBR, by Aalberg solo. It links to a page written in Norwegian and containing a Java applet. Since I can’t read Norwegian and haven’t managed to get Firefox to run Java, I have no clue what’s going on there. I don’t have access to the paper, either, so I’m pretty much in the dark about all of this. If I find out more, I’ll post about it. If you’ve read the paper, feel free to leave a comment and clue me in. Just so you don’t go away completely unfulfilled, here’s a link to BIBSYS, “a leading supplier in Norway of information systems to libraries and institutions of higher education.”

UPDATE: I’ve read the paper. Here’s how they’re doing it:

The process outlined above is implemented in our conversion tool by the use of XSLT — the W3C language for transforming XML. Each entity case is coded as a template following the same control structure, and XPATH expressions are used for the various conditions and selections that need to be applied. The tool reads MARC-records encoded in the MarcXchange XML-format and produces a record for each entity in a format that extends the MarcXchange with FRBR type attributes and a relationship element.

They’re going to publish how they do the work, which will be great, but there are no algorithms or examples in this paper. They use the Library of Congress’s work on MARC and FRBR and cite OCLC’s Work-Set Algorithm.

An interesting development in mass FRBRization. I look forward learning more about it.

Bruce D’Arcus follows up on the “Murdering MARC” e-mail thread on his blog, with Plugging Into FRBR, Killing MARC. He shows a fragment of some RDF (not in XML) that pulls in a bit of FRBR to show that someone is the creator of something.

FRBR came up in the discussion following Karen Coyle’s Murdering MARC message to the ngc4lib (next generation catalogues) mailing list.

Dan Chudnov’s new Library Geeks podcast is That Thing You Do, a rambling chat with Tim Spalding and Abby Blachly of LibraryThing. It’s about 100 minutes long, and at the half-way mark, 50 minutes in, there’s a bit of talk about FRBR.