The FRBR Blog

There’ll be no posts next week, but I’ll catch up later. Stay calm. Be brave. Wait for the signs.

I don’t know German and so can’t read Konrad Umlauf’s Informationsaufbereitung: Vorlesungsskript (which an online translator says means “Information Preparation: Lecture Script”), but it mentions FRBR in section 1.5, Anforderungen an bibliografische Aufnahmen. If you read German, please leave a note explaining it to the rest of us.

Lorcan Dempsey (of OCLC) posted Metadata … on his blog last week. He discusses “conceptual models” like FRBR (What is FRBR? asks Barbara Tillet’s introductory booklet, and the subtitle answers “a conceptual model for the bibliographic universe”), “abstract models” like Dublin Core, and other things. It’s worth a read; also check the comments and follow some of the links.

Ann Chapman, who has the improbable but fascinating title of Interoperability Focus Officer at UKOLN, has a paper in the October 2006 issue of the online journal Ariadne: RDA: A New International Standard. It’s a summary of why Resource Description and Access is being written, how it’s being done, what it will be like, and so on. It’ll be particularly helpful to people from outside the library world, or who aren’t cataloguers, who are a bit vague about AACR and RDA. Since RDA is FRBRy, FRBR is mentioned.

Karen Coyle’s written about FRBR several times recently on her blog (and left a comment or two here), and here’s her latest, from Saturday: FRBRoo (Object-Oriented), commenting on the object-oriented FRBR remodelling project.

The diagram on page 10 of this report implies that there are two forks to the description: the author’s context and the publisher’s context. It seems that today’s cataloging rules (and perhaps RDA as well) conflate those two, and that when those contexts differ the rules emphasize the publisher’s.

In other words, descriptive cataloging is describing the published Work, not the author’s Work. If we see those as separate, would our catalog look more FRBR-like?

Thom Hickey posted Relator Codes and Terms late last month, about MARC relator codes, which “allow the relationship between a name and a work to be designated by codes in the MARC record.”

Karen Coyle followed up last week with Relators. She says:

Thom Hickey did a study of relator codes and relator names ($4 v. $e), which he reported in his blog, and came up with the figures below. His interest was in the interaction between the code and the name. Since his study was done in the OCLC WorldCat catalog, I think it points out that these key roles are not being coded in our records, which essentially results in a lot of false hits for our users. If we can’t get these simple relationships coded into our data today, what hope do we have for a relationship-oriented bibliographic view in the future?

A good question. Better and easier cataloguing tools that help identify these relationships will help. Doing that, and making the best use of the existing defined relationships, will be part of OpenFRBR.

This blog mentioned the new definition of the expression entity at the end of September, but now it’s up at the IFLA web site: Invitation to Participate: World-Wide Review of Revisions to FRBR Section 3.2.2, Definition of the Entity Expression. It’s definitely worth reading, and if you have any comments, get them in by the end of the year.

You already knew I’m a library geek, but now I’m one of the Library Geeks. Last month at the Access 2006 conference in Ottawa Dan Chudnov and I had a lengthy chat in the bar of the Chateau Laurier hotel and now it’s online.

Library Geeks 008 – FRBR and OpenFRBR has the show notes with some links and a correction to a mistake I made about Canadian history (the Last Spike wasn’t gold and it was placed in 1885). You can subscribe to the podcast feed (updated 9 November to point to the right place) to get all the shows, or just listen to our talk about FRBR and OpenFRBR (38.5 MB MP3, 85 minutes).

It was great to meet Dan and I enjoyed the talk very much. What could be more fun than two library geeks talking about FRBR while drinking wine (you’ll hear the waitress come by to ask if we want another glass) in the bar of one of Canada’s best hotels?

Patrick Le Boeuf (past chair of the FRBR Review Group) sent out a pointer to the FRBR mailing list saying he’d just released an update to the FRBR Bibliography (1.4 MB RTF). There’s a new section at the end about the object-oriented formulation of FRBR, and it includes these links to a FRBRoo section of the CIDOC site:

• FRBRoo Introduction: “The FRBRoo is a formal ontology intended to capture and represent the underlying semantics of bibliographic information and to facilitate the integration, mediation, and interchange of bibliographic and museum information.”
• Drafts of the FRBRoo model
• Reports and Minutes
• Technical Papers and References

FRBR uses an entity-relationship model (it has three different kinds of entities), and FRBRoo does it as an object-oriented model.

(I think it’s officially pronounced “ferber oh-oh” but I like to call it “ferberoo.”)

Pat Riva, chair of the group, sent along a pointer to updates to the list of meeting and activity reports of the FRBR Review Group. Two sets of minutes from the August meetings in Seoul are now up.

First, there’s the FRBR Review Group Meeting Report, 20 August 2006 (162 KB PDF). I strongly agree with this quote; this same thinking is what led me to OpenFRBR:

Discussion focused on the recommendation that the RG should give more priority to advocacy, specifically developing evidence-based arguments that demonstrate the value of FRBR. This recommendation stems from the observation that vendors have a perception that FRBR implementation is costly, and that purchasers of systems are not sufficiently aware of the benefits of FRBR for end users to request it. Demonstration projects have great potential in demonstrating value concretely.

The other new report is Working Group on Aggregates Meeting Report, 20 August 2006 (174 KB PDF). Aggregates are tricky, and that’s why there’s a special group looking into them.

The discussion centered on a debate describing two distinct models for aggregates (independently created works published together).

Examples: Audio CD, Web sites, Conference proceedings, Anthologies of poetry and/or prose literature, Song/music books, Trilogies, Conference proceedings, Serials (collections that are intended to be together), Monographic series (collections that are intended to be together)

Model 1: The whole is a manifestation that functions as the glue that holds a set of works together.

Model 2: The whole is a work in and of itself: a “work-of-works.”

Proposed activity: The group will collect examples of aggregates, whose relationships will be described using each of the two models under review.

This is important work and I look forward to the results. I’ll have to think over some examples and see which model works best. It’s a knotty issue.