The FRBR Blog

Steven MacCall, a prof at the library school at the University of Alabama, has posted slides from a lecture in his Information of Organization class: Historical Overview of Information Organization, AKA The ‘From Tablets to FRBR’ Lecture (requires Flash). It’s lecture three in his course and it looks like his students got a good introduction to FRBR. His students blog about their readings (for example, see Course Blog in Alabama in July 2005) and there’s always something about FRBR assigned.

S.R. Ranganathan‘s 1931 masterpiece The Five Laws of Library Science is available online as 10 PDFs at the dLIST open access archive at the University of Arizona. You should read it.

The five laws are:

1. Books are for use.
2. Every person his [or her] book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

I think the book is one of the most important works written in library science. I think the laws should underpin everything we do every day. Memorize them so you can quote them in meetings. You’ll be amazed at how they cut things down to some sensible size and help you remember what’s important.

FRBR fulfills the laws: it will help people find their books, it will help books be found, it will save the time of the reader, and it is part of the continuing growth of libraries not just in shelves and buildings but in ideas and services.

You’ll also be interested in Ranganathan’s Monologue on Melvil Dewey, a fifteen-minute talk he gave in 1964.

The 2007 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting starts next week. The calendar of events lists one FRBR-related discussion, on Sunday 21 January: “FRBR: Will It Positively Impact Acquisitions? If So, How, and What Will It Take to Get There?” I hope someone blogs it and reports on what’s said; if someone does, I’ll link to it.

Two days ago Tom Delsey gave this to the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR: Analysis of the Proposed CONSER Standard Record vis à vis RDA, CONSER being the Cooperative Online Serials Program. It says, “The following is an analysis of recommendations on cataloguing rules, rule interpretations, and practices set out in appendix M of the Access Level Record for Serials Working Group’s final report as they relate to the development of RDA.

There’s one paragraph about FRBR in Delsey’s report, and I’ll quote it all here.

More importantly, however, the relationships that will be defined in RDA (based on the FRBR model and the relationship types defined by Tillett) treat translations and language editions as modifications of a work. RDA will therefore provide instructions on reflecting the primary relationship between a translation or language edition and the related work (i.e., the work realized by that translation or language edition) by means of an identifier, a name (i.e., a controlled access point), or a description representing the related work. Following the FRBR model, RDA will also provide instructions on reflecting, if necessary, the relationship between a translation or language edition and a related expression (i.e., the specific language version used as the basis for that translation or language edition) by means of an identifier, a name (i.e., a controlled access point), or a description representing the related expression. But RDA will not provide instructions on reflecting the relationship between a translation or language edition and another manifestation (i.e., a manifestation embodying the original language expression of the work). That is because both the FRBR model and the relationship types defined by Tillett categorize translations and language editions as expressions of a work, and therefore define a relationship involving a translation or language edition as either a primary relationship between an expression and the work realized by the expression or as an expression-to-expression relationship, but not as an expression-to-manifestation relationship. If the intent of the CONSER recommendation is to allow the construction of an added entry using the title proper of the original manifestation rather than a uniform title for the work embodied in that manifestation, introducing instructions in RDA to support the recommendation would effectively require defining a new relationship type(s) to cover the relationship between a resource embodying a translation or language edition and a related manifestation embodying another language version of the same work (i.e., a relationship that would function as an expression-to-manifestation relationship). Defining such a relationship would seriously compromise the alignment of RDA both with the FRBR model and with the relationship types defined by Tillett.

(Seen on the AUTOCAT mailing list, posted by Nathalie Schulz.)

A chap who just goes by “Steve” posted Abstractness, FRBR on the Circulatable blog, in which he comments on that paper by Renear and Choi that people have been pondering.

Frédérick Giasson posted Major Revision (1.01) of the Music Ontology on his blog on Saturday. If you’re interested in FRBR as applied to music, or the knottier questions of aggregate works, have a dekko.

The ontology took a major shift by its deep integration with the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) ontologies.

As you will see with the classes schemas bellow, all the MO classes related with music are sub classes of FRBR classes. The FRBR ontology is used as the basement of musical works. So as you will see, a mo:Album is a sub class of a mo:MusicalWork and this class is a sub class of the frbr:Work class. This means that an album is ultimately a work in the sense of the FRBR ontology.

He includes some sample SPARQL queries at the bottom. Check the comments, too.

Some of the best from February 2006:

• 27: More relationships between Groups, which includes this diagram (72 KB PNG) that shows all of the entity groups and their relationships all at once, instead of in three different diagrams. A few people have asked to use this: you’re welcome to do so, and don’t need to ask permission.
• 24: Group 1 relationships summarizes what the Final Report says about how the works, expressions. manifestations, and entities can relate.
• 22: LibraryThing has works.
• 13: Hal Cain says FRBR is a set of leaky containers.

Time to catch up on some of the best stuff from last year. Here are some from January 2006:

• 27: Four Questions: Barbara Tillett, a top librarian answers the famous four FRBR questions.
• 24: Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California, a large and interesting report.
• 5: Audio: Access 2005 Hackfest mention of FRBR, because listening to Hackfest talks is fun.

Last month I posted a link to a paper by Allen H. Renear and Yunseon Choi: Modeling Our Understanding, Understanding Our Models: The Case of Inheritance in FRBR (95 KB PDF). There are a couple of comments on that post, and yesterday Karen Coyle posted FRBR OO – Not? on her blog, and Jonathan Rochkind left a comment. Have a look. I read the paper over the holidays but need to read it again before following up.

Happy new year to those of you who now write 2007 in your e-mail headers.

Patrick LeBoeuf’s FRBR: Hype or Cure-All (the special issue of Cataloging & Classification) is reviewed by Alan Danskin in Catalogue & Index (#154, Autumn 2006). The whole table of contents of that issue is online. I just found out about it because it’s mentioned in their new blog, which went live yesterday. Greetings!