The FRBR Blog

I won’t post anything more until after Christmas. To help you pass the time, here’s FRBR Word Search #2 (35 KB PDF), a riotously amusing word search puzzle where you need to look for words like “obtain,” “aggregates,” and “ThingISBN.” For added frivolity, I added some names from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

In case you missed it, here’s last year’s word search puzzle. It’s an annual FRBR Blog tradition!

Lorcan Dempsey posted last week about the updated version of OCLC’s interesting FictionFinder. As he puts it, it “offers a ‘frbresque’ view of the data, clustering records under works; it aggregates data from multiple records to create a fuller ‘work’ level record; it richly indexes the data allowing searches on fictitious characters, settings, language, and so on, alongside the usual attributes like author and title; it ranks results by OCLC holdings (the number of libraries we know about which hold the item).” I searched for “three musketeers” and at the top of the results was Trois mousquetaires, which has 860 different editions (or manifestations). The new design is nice and displays a lot of information clearly.

The Library of Congress has formed the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, or, as we’ll call them for short, the WoGroFuBiCo.

FRBR will be one of the things they look at and think about. The group is to “present findings on how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices can effectively support management of and access to library materials in the evolving information and technology environment,” “recommend ways in which the library community can collectively move toward achieving this vision,” and “advise the Library of Congress on its role and priorities.” One of the members of the group is Olivia Madison, who was chair of the FRBR group when their report was written.

Allen H. Renear and Yunseon Choi: Modeling Our Understanding, Understanding Our Models: The Case of Inheritance in FRBR (95 KB PDF). In Grove, Andrew, Eds. Proceedings 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) 43. Here’s the abstract:

IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) presents a compelling and influential model of the “bibliographic universe.” However there are interesting variations between FRBR’s formal model and the narrative expositions of FRBR’s authors and explicators - that is, between the formal model and the framework as more broadly understood by the FRBR community. In this paper we argue that despite a widespread belief to the contrary, attribute inheritance down the “hierarchy” of Group 1 entities is inconsistent both with the formal model and with the general spirit of the project. We believe these observations reveal an ongoing uncertainty about the nature of bibliographic entities as well as difficulties in maintaining a clear and exact understanding of the models we are using to represent those entities - even when those models are our own creation.

Here’s the page for the article on the E-LIS site, with the references. I haven’t read it yet, but will post about it when I have. It looks very interesting.

A couple of reviews by students at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama, blogged as part of their coursework, mention FRBR:

• David Weber’s The Changing Character of the Catalog in America
• Patrick LeBoeuf’s FRBR: Hype or Cure-All?

Disintegration, disenchantment, distrust, and development by Candy Zemon, of the library system vendor Polaris, mentions FRBR briefly.

There is a bandwagon rolling about in email-list-land, the biblioblogosphere, conference presentations, and other library industry publications. It seems that the PAC (public catalog) sucks. And that putting lipstick on the pig (to quote Andrew Pace) doesn’t make it any more attractive.

I doubt you will find many folks who would argue much with the points made about particular public catalogs: that they are dull, jargon-laden, poorly designed, obscure, inconsistent in navigation, slow, labyrinthine, fragmented, usable only with a librarian’s point of view and expertise, complex, and downright unhelpful and obstructive.

… Open source software and people willing to use it are changing some of the ground rules. The importance of accessing information both inside and outside the library world means opening ourselves to more than one true data transmission protocol (our favored MARC). FRBR notions of data modeling force us to look at relationships and tasks as being critical to providing efficient information service. New technologies and new expectations of service across the entire range of our customer base stretch everyone’s notion of what a library could or should do.

I’m back, bearing a quote from one Sir James Murray: “The question is not whether we know a Widmerpool in our own lives, but whose Widmerpool are we?” But enough of A Dance to the Music of Time, and let’s get back to FRBR, noting that the twelve-volume sequence is FRBRistically challenging.

I hadn’t heard tell of it before now, but something interesting happened in Texas last month: the 2006 conference of the American Society of Information Science and Technology (known as ASIST). One of the sessions was Theoretical Topics in FRBR, with Allen Renear (moderator), Yunseon Choi, Jonathan Furner, and Jerome McDonough. Mark Lindner was there and wrote about it on his blog. Looks like it was an interesting session.