The FRBR Blog

This isn’t about FRBR, but I hope that after twenty months you won’t begrudge me talking about something else for just one day. This is the best place I have to ask this question.

Anyone reading this blog is familiar with the ideas of “Web 2.0″ and “Library 2.0.” Publisher Tim O’Reilly coined Web 2.0 and said: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.” Blogs, tagging, Ajax, RSS, and mashups are all part of Web 2.0.

Michael Casey on LibraryCrunch coined Library 2.0. There’s some debate about what exactly the term means and how much it relies on technology. Is it just about blogging and RSS and Ajaxotic catalogue interfaces that leverage folksonomic synergies, or does it include having teenagers hang out all night in a branch playing computer games, and does it go so far as letting people actually drink a cup of coffee while on library property? Is it just a way of thinking? My definition requires the use of technology: Library 2.0 is the use of Web 2.0 means to fulfill the end that libraries have always had: to make the world a better place through access to information and knowledge.

Web 2.0 is a big thing. People are getting rich off it. There are books and web sites and blogs and RSS feeds and mailing lists about it and reams of JSON and XML passing back and forth over XMLHttpRequest as people do stuff that a couple of years ago would have seemed like magic.

In the library world, Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 are pretty big things. No-one’s getting rich off it, but people are figuring out how to apply whatever they think Library 2.0 is to make their services and operations better for users. Lots of smart and talented librarians expend lots of energy talking about it and implementing it. That’s good.

But what about Climate 2.0? The world’s temperatures are expected to rise by 2 to 6° C by the end of the century if things continue as they are now. Vast and frightening possibilities and probabilities face us because of the increase in greenhouse gases, the acidification of the oceans, and other environmental effects of human cause.

Where is all the talk and work in the library world about this? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be releasing its fourth report in parts over 2007 (the first part in a week or so, so keep an eye peeled), and it will contain enormous amounts of information. There are more and more good books on the subject, more blogs and web sites, more documentaries, more movies, more novels (I highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent Science in the Capital series about climate change and how people do science: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting), more newspaper and magazine articles, more raw data, more concern, more debate, more consensus, more worry, more people wondering what they can do and how.

Perhaps there’s a lot going on and I’ve missed it. If you know of any resources for librarians interested in the subject and working on it, please leave a comment. It’s a perfect situation for librarians to help: lots of confusing information, and lots of people who want to make sense of it. The Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 approaches will help. It can be as important to provide tools for other people to do something as it is to do the thing itself. Blogging and better catalogues will help in a general sense, but what about the direct application of library skills to the subject? What’s being done, what needs to be done, what should be done?

All pointers, comments, and suggestions are welcome. (Note that if you post a comment there will be a delay before it appears; they are held in a queue for approval so that no spam gets through.)

Brad Eden reports that the issue he put together for Library Technology Reports (November/December 2006, 42:6), Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records, is available. As you’d guess from the title, it’s all about FRBR.

Library Technology Reports isn’t a regular magazine or journal and you won’t find it on the newsstand. If you’re not at a university or some large institution like that you may find it difficult to get a copy, but try your public library. They may have access through an online service.

I’m a couple of weeks late in pointing this out, but Mark Lindner posted Can Something Be Abstract and Not Have the Property of Being Abstract? on his blog on 9 January 2007, commenting on the Renear and Choi paper that’s been mentioned here a few times now. In the comments, Lindner says that FRBR should be implementable and not just theoretical, and that “Renear and Choi are trying to help make FRBR just that. Allen Renear is one of the biggest supporters of FRBR that we have at UIUC. He does guest lectures in most any class that talks about it. And he leaves out (most of) the high minded philosophical abstractions when he does.”

I linked to Lindner’s blog late last year (see Theoretical Topics in FRBR) because he blogged about a conference session of that title that included Renear and Choi.

Dianne Hillmann posted No Discussion Discussion on RDA yesterday on the LITA blog. It’s about a session at the recent American Library Association Midwinter conference, where Resource Description and Access was discussed and FRBR came up. Worth reading as follow-up to the paper Hillmann and Karen Coyle wrote that has blogs and mailing lists (and, for all I know, telephone lines, post boxes, and pneumatic tubes) abuzz.

And don’t miss Jonathan Rochkind’s report on what went on at the FRBR Implementer’s session!

Following on the open thread, I will now have a closed thread, where no discussion is allowed.

Blogs with thousands of readers and dozens of people posting comments on each entry sometimes have “open threads,” empty posts where readers can start whatever sort of discussion they want in the comments. I thought I’d try it here, so if you want to say something, go ahead! If you don’t, you may of course remain silent.

Karen Coyle and Diane Hillmann have a paper in the January/February 2007 issue of D-Lib Magazine: Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century. It’s caused some lively discussion on blogs and maliing lists, including this thread from the NGC4LIB mailing list; both Coyle and Hillmann are on the list and in the thread.

In addition, although lip service has been paid to the FRBR Group I entities and the idea of disaggregating the current cataloging record to better make use of FRBR’s insights, RDA is not going in this direction. The focus of RDA is called “the resource” and the resource is a FRBR manifestation/item described using the same concept of a pre-coordinated “record” as we find in AACR2. This record brings together in single package a bibliographic description based on a manifestation, as well as some elements that “reflect attributes of work and expression associated the intellectual or artistic content of a resource”.

Who Owns the Work?, a post on the Titles Varies Slightly blog, is a short piece pointing out the interesting job FRBR will have of dealing with the Beatles album Love, which uses parts of 130 different songs to make new remixes and mashups.

“Revolution Number Nine” would be hard to fully describe, too.

Jonathan Rochkind noticed this schedule for the ALA Midwinter conference that starts this week lists the “FRBR Implementers Group” as meeting on Friday 19 January at 10:30 AM. It’s not listed on the ALA Midwinter wiki, though. If you know anything about it, please post a comment.

Here’s something you don’t see every day, but you probably will see more frequently: someone asks a question about a database (MySQL in this case) and query optimization, and in the code snippets you can see that the project uses FRBR. MySQL query Optimization Without Indexes is posted by someone from the Internet Book List (Steven Jeffrey, I assume), and if you look at the snippet you’ll see some Perl code that’s querying a database with table names such as frbr_work_author and frbr_work_genre. Interesting!