Access 2006 and xISBN
Last week I was at Access 2006, a conference about libraries and technology, and I had a good time. I met a number of people I’ve only known online and I saw some interesting talks.
Of course, I kept an ear out for mentions of FRBR. Some people talked about it, some people were interested in it, others didn’t know what it was. The most commonly known and used FRBR thing is OCLC’s xISBN. That’s understandable, because it’s the biggest and most useful FRBRish thing out there, even though it’s still in a fairly primitive state. If you give it an ISBN, it will give you back a list of other ISBNs that are manifestations of the same work. Tools like LibX can use that so that when someone is looking at a page that mentions an ISBN they can be shown any other manifestations (editions, in this case) in their local library. For example, if someone’s looking at a Penguin Classics edition of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair at an online bookstore then it’s useful to show them that the Oxford Classics edition is available for free at the library.
xISBN is useful and reliable and it generates answers from an enormous union catalogue. Any other FRBR-related tool that anyone makes, if it’s also useful and reliable and based on a large data set, will soon find itself used in all sorts of ways. Some of them will surprise us. xISBN shows is that any kind of FRBRization helps.
Over the next few days I’ll catch up on what happened while I was away.
There were a couple of papers and special sessions at DC-2006 (the annual Dublin Core conference) this year in Mexico that mentioned FRBR.
Julie Allinson (UKOLN, University of Bath) and I (Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation) ran a special session on using Dublin Core to describe eprints (scholarly research papers). The session was based on some JISC-funded work that we have been doing to develop a Dublin Core application profile:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile
This work uses a combination of FRBR and the DCMI Abstract Model to create a ‘description set’ for an eprint that is much richer than the traditional flat descriptions normally associated with Dublin Core. The intention is to capture some of the relationships between works, expressions, manifestations, copies and agents (to use our terminology).
Slides for the session are available at:
http://slideshare.net/eduservfoundation/eprints-special-session-dc2006-mexico/
The response to this work at the meeting was quite positive, but I’d be interested in views about whether the way we’ve used FRBR in the context makes sense.
Comment by Andy Powell — 17 October 2006 @ 4:39 amCool!
As a note, that link (for the moment) requires a login to slideshare. We’re working hard to open the site up to the masses … should only be a few more days!
-J
Comment by Jonathan Boutelle — 19 October 2006 @ 1:08 amExcellent.
Comment by wtd — 19 October 2006 @ 12:09 pm