The FRBR Blog

Ian Strang, a librarian not far from the FRBR Blog central office, has an interesting post on his blog: FRBRising with the Folks. He was thinking about the failures of FRBRizing by algorithms and automated processes:

The problem that I just don’t see them getting around is that often the “work” is simply not represented in the traditional bibliographic record, not even as a combination of elements. If this is the case no amount of processing by computer or librarian will be able to accurately and consistently identify and group “works”. What the FRBRisation process needs is just a little added information about each record. This seems like a perfect task for a social bookmarking application.

I’ve been thinking along the same lines as he was: that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk would be a good way of doing this. Strang found something interesting, though:

Interestingly Amazon developed the Mechanical Turk initially for internal use, to do much the same thing as I’m suggesting. Amazon had a problem with duplicate records. They realized that many products were virtually the same and could be sold/inventoried as a single product but were in their database as two items. It was for to large a problem to give to one person of even a group of people so they created a task marketplace, what would evolve into the Mechanical Turk. A program would identify to similar records and then submit them to the market place as a task. All the Amazon employee had to do to earn a few extra bucks was glance at each record and answer yes or no to the program. If the answer was yes the records were merged, if no the program moved on. All I’m suggesting is that something like to “work set” algorithm replace the Amazon program. Sure it would cost, but looking at how things are priced, not as much as one might think.