The FRBR Blog

Karen Coyle posted FRBR User Tasks on her blog last week.

I have long had a hard time with the FRBR user tasks, but haven’t been able to quite articulate it. This is an attempt to do so.

There are some good comments, too.

Over the last few days there’s been some very interesting discussion on the ngc4lib mailing list. It’s for the discussion of the next-generation catalogue (what exactly that means is part of the reason for the list).

Last Tuesday, Tim Spalding of LibraryThing posted When Tags Work and When They Don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing. Go read it, if you haven’t. Here’s his abstract: “This is an extensive post, revealing the results of a statistical comparison between Amazon and LibraryThing tags, and exploring why tagging has turned out relatively poorly for Amazon. I end by making concrete recommendations for ecommerce sites interested in making tagging work.”

Spalding posted a link to this on ngc4lib and discussion ensued about why people tag on LibraryThing (and other places where tagging has worked well) and don’t on Amazon or WorldCat (or other places where it’s a dud). Someone brought up having private and public tags. There was chat about the difference between tags like “fiction” or “medieval history” and “gift” or “in bedroom.”

Tim Spalding said: “I think there’s a sort of misplaced Platonism in this concept. (This is also my problem with FRBR.) There is no ‘Price and Prejudice’ in the sky, only copies situated in the real world. ‘At mum’s house’ and ‘Victorian’ may divide alone item/work, but what about ‘English class’?”

Mike Taylor replied: “What about it? It seems pretty clearly a property of the work rather than of the item.”

Spalding had also said: “(The latter is very personal, but the physicality isn’t important–maybe you lost your copy and got a new one.)”

Taylor replied, with great insight: “Right — which is why I argued that the important distinction here is not between Personal and Public tags, but Work and Item tags.”

Very interesting!

The thread continued, with Spalding saying FRBR is a binary model and referencing David Weinberger, Jonathan Rochkind commenting on that, and more. More mail has come in while I’ve written this. Go browse through the archives and see what Karen Coyle, Kent Fitch, and others are saying. It’s lively and thought-provoking.

Friday, the day after I posted De Revolutionibus, I went to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto to have a look at their copy of the 1566 second edition of Nicolaus Copernicus’s book.

The Fisher is a great place. If you’re in Toronto, drop by and have a look. The outside is a repulsive brutalist structure; the inside is a beautiful, majestic temple to books, history, and knowledge, dark and redolent of old paper. There are no interior floors, and you can see the shelves around the walls going up six storeys. Anyone can get a card and ask for a book to be brought down to the reading room. Go in. Inhale deeply and smell a good library.

In An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden: Brill, 2002), Owen Gingerich says this about the provenance of the Fisher’s copy (item):

1. “Possibly the copy of Philips Lansbergen (1561-1632), Dutch astronomer.”
2. Later a fellow named James Erskine had it.
3. In late Victorian times, the library of the Society of Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet had it.
4. Historian and ollector Stillman Drake bought it at auction, and later donated it to the Fisher.

Five owners over 450 years leaves a lot to be filled in.

There’s a sign of another owner in some writings on the beginning blank pages. Someone wrote in by hand a chronology, “Chronographia,” the first part labelled “Christum praecedens” (before Christ, i.e. B.C.) and the second the Latin equivalent of after Christ (I forgot to note it). It identifies 6984 BC as the year Adam was created and runs through other Biblical and historical events down to 753 BC, when Rome was founded. Someone (the same person?) did a sum beside and added 1668 to 753 to get 2421. Whoever did that must have been looking at this chronology in 1668 and wondered just how many years it had been since Rome’s founding, and did the addition on paper because it was a bit too tricky to do it mentally. Later notes in the chronology mention Plato, Euclid, Archimedes, and other mathematics and astronomy dates and names.

Gingerich says about this item:

Heavily annotated, especially in Book III, in a small script and much faded brown ink. There are nine preliminary flyleaves, mostly blank, with schematic diagrams of the heliocentric celestial sphere on pp. 2-3, and a chronological table on pp. 5-7.

At the top of the title page, DULCES ANTE OMNIA MUSAE. At the end of the Osiander “Ad lectorem,” “Petrus Ramus in Epist[ola] sua ad Rheticum de conformanda Logicis Legibus Astrologia existimat hauc esse Rhetici praefationem.” (“Petrus Ramus in his letter to Rheticus concerning the agreement of astronomy with the rules of logic thinks that this preface is from Rheticus.”) This refers to the letter of Ramus to Rheticus of 25 August 1563, apparently first published in 1599 in ref 1 and reprinted by Birkenmajer [ref. 2] and Burmeister [ref. 3]; see ref. 4. A copy of this annotation is found in Warsaw 2.

“Warsaw 2″ is another copy (item) of this same second edition (manifestation), in Warsaw. It’s the second one Gingerich lists in that city. He says it is “clearly closely related to the Toronto copy,” and that the annotations throughout it are generally the same. It has a note in it that Kepler wrote in one of his own copies that Schreiber named Osiander as the writer of the introduction.

Phew! So we have:

• Nicolaus Copernicus (person), his book De Revolutionibus (work), its expression, its two manifestations, their printers (persons or corporate bodies, I don’t know), etc.
• Lansberger (person) who might have owned the Toronto copy (item).
• James Erskine (person) who owned the Toronto item.
• The Society of Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet (corporate body) who owned the Toronto item.
• Stillman Drake (person) who owned the Toronto item and donated it to …
• The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library who own the Toronto item now.
• Whoever (person) did the chronology on the blank pages at the start. Lansberger? Someone else?
• Possibly a post-Lansberger owner (person) who did the 1668 + 753 sum. Lansberger died in 1632 so it seems very unlikely he’d have done the calculation.
• Andreas Osiander (person) who did the introduction to De Revolutionibus, but anonymously.
• Kepler (person) who got his copy (item) of a manifestation of De Revolutionibus (work) from Schreiber (person) who was given it by the printer (person).
• Petrus Ramus (person), who wrote a letter to …
• Rheticus (person) discussing De Revolutionibus (work).
• Works, expressions, manifestations where this letter is reprinted (the Berkenmajer and Burmeister references).
• The Warsaw 2 item, another item from the same manifestation (edition) as the Toronto item.
• Whatever persons and corporate bodies owned Warsaw 2.
• Whatever person wrote the annotations in Warsaw 2. Since they are very close to those in the Toronto item, I assume that either one was copied from the other or both were copied from a third item.
• Owen Gingerich (person), who examined the Toronto and Warsaw 2 items, lists them in An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) (work) and discusses this work and De Revolutionibus (work) and its manifestations and items in The Book Nobody Read (work).
• William Denton (person), who has a copy (item) of The Book Nobody Read (work) and looked at the Fisher’s (corporate body) copy (item) of De Revolutionibus (work) and copy (item) of the Census (work).
• A.R. (person), a journalist and documentary film maker, who I met at a party Thursday night, who once interviewed Gingerich (person) about another Renaissance work on astronomy (work) for an article (work) she was writing for a magazine …
• This post in its original form and in a slightly modified updated version, the previous post and its comments, this blog’s RSS feed, the copy of this post on Planet Code4Lib, Planet Code4Lib’s RSS feed, blog posts that link to the previous post …

It’s complicated enough just doing all the entities and relationships that Gingerich covers in the Census. When we add discussion of Gingerich and De Revolutionibus that takes place on the Internet, it gets even more complicated and confusing. That’s a lot of works, expressions, manifestations, item, persons, and corporate bodies, and all kinds of different relationships between them all.

Right now it’s all in Gingerich’s Census, which I say again is an astounding piece of scholarship, but is trapped on paper. If its contents were also available in RDF, for example, related to controlled vocabularies or ontologies about people and publishing and astronomy and countries and provenance and the history of science … Well, imagine the possibilities.

I’m reading The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus by Owen Gingerich (US: Walker and Company; Canada: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2004). Gingerich is an astronomer and historian of science who took an intense interest in Nicolaus Copernicus’s 1543 book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. (It’s known as De Revolutionibus, and Gingerich gives the pronunciation as “Day Revoluty-OWN-ibus.”)

There were a few hundred copies (items) of the first edition (manifestation) done in Nuremberg in 1543 (the year Copernicus died, aged 70), and a few hundred of the second edition (manifestation) done in Basel in 1566. It’s a crucial book in astronomy and the history of science. Kepler, Brahe, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, and most of the other important figures in Renaissance science read it. Many of them annotated their copies, and many of those personal copies still exist. Gingerich spent years travelling around the world looking at every copy (item) he could find (in rare book libraries, museums, and personal collections) and figuring out who had owned them and who had written the annotations, if any. The Book Nobody Read tells the story behind the writing of an astounding piece of scholarship, An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden: Brill, 2002). It will be exciting reading for people interested in bibliography and the histories of astronomy, science, and books.

Why do I mention it here? Because it’s a great example of a work (The Book Nobody Read) about another work (De Revolutionibus), a work about manifestations (the two printings), a work about items (the copies owned by Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s teacher Michael Maestlin, a contemporary of theirs named Jerome Schreiber, and others), and more. It’s a whole big mix of fascinating relationships between Group 1 (work, expression, manifestation, item) and Group 2 (person, corporate body) entities. (I’ll skip the Group 3 entities such as concept and place for now to keep things simpler.) In fact, The Book Nobody Read is also a work about another work, An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566), which is a work about De Revolutionibus, but I’ll leave that out as well, for simplicity.

Here’s a thumbnail of a large diagram that maps out some of the relationships. It’s a link to the full-size version (103 KB PNG), so pull that up in a separate window or tab.

Along the top you have Nicolaus Copernicus, creator of the work De Revolutionibus. I believe it just had the one expression that was used for both of the printings (manifestations) done in 1543 and 1566. To keep things simple we’ll ignore any corrections made while the printing was underway. (See note below.) Also along the top you have the anonymous introduction that was added to the book. It was written by Andreas Osiander (1498-1552) and said that the book wasn’t meant to really say that the Earth went around the Sun, but just that this was a good way of making calculations simpler. I have the book and the introduction as two related works that come together in the manifestations.

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) had a copy of the book. It was given to him by Jerome Schreiber, a mathematician, who had got a copy from his friend the Nuremberg publisher and thus knew who’d done the introduction. Schreiber annotated it before passing it on. Gingerich looked at this copy (this item, in FRBR terms) and saw that it had also been annotated by Kepler’s teacher, Michael Maestlin. This bit gets a bit confusing, so I’ll quote Gingerich:

What follows is an exercise in minutiae, but one that ultimately offers a most intriguing insight into Kepler’s student-teacher relationship with Michael Maestlin. Below Schreiber’s note is another, looking at first glance very much like Kepler’s hand, yet clearly distinct from Kepler’s annotations elsewhere in the book. In fact, I believe it matches Michael Maestlin’s hand more closely than Kepler’s….

Why do I get excited about something as esoteric as this? Because the presence of this little note tells us that Kepler showed his copy to his teacher, and that’s why Maestlin was so sure it was Osiander who had written the anonymous introduction to Copernicus’s book. There it was in Kepler’s copy, in black and white, coming straight from Schreiber, a Wittenburg insider.

So: Schreiber got a copy of the book from the printer, and annotated it. He gave the copy to Kepler. Kepler annotated it. Kepler showed his copy to his teacher Maestlin, who wrote his own comment in the margin. Maestlin annotated his own copy with a similar comment, and indicated in his copy where he had annotated Kepler’s copy.

All of this is mapped out in the bottom left of the diagram. I apologize for not using directed lines (with arrows on the ends) to indicate what direction relationships are in. It does show, however, the item-to-item and person-to-person relationships. It’s fascinating to think of two people looking at and discussing a third person’s annotations in a book, and one of the two marking up his own copy to show where the marginalia was in the other. And then centuries later, Gingerich came along, looked at them all, and figured out what it all meant!

Over on the right is a cluster of entities representing Owen Gingerich, his book, its publishers, and me and my copy. I like this bit because it puts me six degrees of FRBR separation away from Copernicus.

There are scores of other interesting relationships that could be given here. For instance, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) owned a copy. The Roman Catholic Church put De Revolutionibus on its list of forbidden books, and sent out instructions on which bits of the book were to be censored. Galileo scratched out the relevant lines in his copy and there’s a picture of this in The Book Nobody Read. As well, Kepler worked for Tycho Brahe, who had a copy of De Revolutionibus and annotated it; some people copied Brahe’s annotations into their own copies; Leibniz had a copy and annotated it; Newton annotated a copy; Gingerich describes many others.

In summary, because of Gingerich’s An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) a very complete FRBRization of relationships around Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus could be done. It would stretch from work-to-work relations down to item-to-item relations, and connect hundreds of different people and corporate bodies with the Group 1 entities and each other. This would be very useful to bibliographers, historians of science, librarians, and collectors, but it would be a lot of work. The editors would need good tools to create and manage all of the bibliographic and personal relationships, and the users would need a navigation and visualization system that gave them customizable views of the information.

Note about expressions: Both of the first two manifestations (editions) of De Revolutionibus were done on a hand press. While the printer was printing, if he noticed a typographical error he could have fixed it right then by poking out one letter and popping in another before he did another sheet. Thus two items from the same manifestation could be different by, for example, one letter in one signature (bundle of pages). Does this mean that they are actually two different expressions? It depends. The expression entity is under revision and the proposed revision (62 KB PDF) says:

On a practical level, the degree to which bibliographic distinctions are made between variant expressions of a work will depend to some extent on the nature of the work itself, on the anticipated needs of users and on what the cataloguer can reasonably be expected to recognize from the manifestation being described.

If we built a FRBRized system for managing all of this, we’d want it to be able to record all such information (because Gingerich and bibliographers and historians need it) but we wouldn’t display it to users unless they asked for it. By default, I think we’d make it so that all these expressions would be considered as one unless the user wanted to see all the details. Sort of a basic and expert view.

One last note: If you have access to it, have a look at An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566). Browse through and consider all of the work that went into it, and all of the history contained in the items listed.

Jon Udell has an interesting blog and most Fridays he posts a telephone interview. The blog is worth reading and the podcast series is worth monitoring. Last Friday Udell interviewed Dan Chudnov, who, you may recall, has a podcast series of his own, and interviewed me last October.

Udell’s post A Conversation with Dan Chudnov About OpenURL, Context-Sensitive Linking, and Digital Archiving explains what the conversation is about, and Chudnov’s The Other End of the Mic: OpenURL, Crossing Over explains his side of it.

Here’s the conversation between Jon Udell and Dan Chudnov (24 MB MP3). I mention it here because there’s a brief mention of FRBR and xISBN at the 41 minute mark. The larger questions of archiving and access that they discuss will, at some level, all involve FRBR.

Library student and blogger “Kelly” posted LS 500 Humphry Clinker on her blog, a commentary on Ed O’Neill’s paper about FRBRizing Humphry Clinker. Good to see this kind of thing assigned as reading in library school courses.

One thing I like about that OCLC project is that it’s made me remember that it was Tobias Smollett who wrote Humphry Clinker, not Humphry Clinker who wrote Tobias Smollett.

Chris Oliver (a librarian at McGill University, ergo a colleague of Pat Riva, chair of the FRBR Review Group) has a paper called RDA and Ejournals in Journal of Electronic Resource Description & Access (vol 8).

Abstract RDA: Resource Description and Access is the new content standard that moves beyond the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules through its alignment with the conceptual frameworks expressed in Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Records (FRAR). It addresses two major problems in bibliographic description: seriality and content versus carrier, and makes the description of ejournals a straightforward process.

I haven’t read it, but it looks like you just need to register to read the articles in this online journal. Why, I don’t know, but there you have it.

Late last month I passed on word from Brad Eden that the Library Technology Reports issue on FRBR that he’d edited (November/December 2006, 42:6) was out. At the time it hadn’t made its way into the offerings of the vendors that carry it online, like Gale. It’s there now, though, so if you didn’t find it before, go back and look again.

The issue is an enormous annotated bibliography of FRBR-related writings, from journal articles to blog posts to presentation slides. It’s an impressive piece of work and I highly recommend you track down a copy.

… there are very few people out there who really understand what FRBR is and supposedly will do. In my opinion, there are a whole lot of people that don’t understand FRBR at all, not, however, for a lack of trying. It is surprisingly simple in its prototype applications, but highly complex in its explanations. Why this is, I am not quite sure.

As a result, I have shifted my focus from trying to be an expert on FRBR (because I’m not, nor do I want to be) to being a vehicle for providing concise, readable, and hopefully understandable abstracts on the variety of resources available related to FRBR.

Library school students: If you’re writing a paper about FRBR, start with this.

On 1 February (I think it was just a one-day event) there took place at Háskólinn í Reykjavík (Reykjavik University, in Iceland) a conference called Back to Basics – and Flying into the Future. It looks like it was an interesting day. The conference page lists the talks and has links to their slides and you’ll probably want to look at them all; here are the ones that mention FRBR in the title:

• Trond Aalberg’s FRBR and MARC: Match or Mismatch? (633 KB PPT).
• John Espley’s Differentiating Libraries Through Enriched User Searching: FRBR Implementation in Virtua (2.6 MB PPT); includes lots of screenshots of VTLS’s Virtua system.
• Erik Thorlund Jepsen’s Bibliographic Relations (2.1 MB PPT).
• Barbara Tillett’s Cataloging Codes and Conceptual Models: RDA and the Influence of FRBR and Other IFLA Initiatives (1.9 MB PPT); includes her speaking notes so you can read along and pretend you were there!

Maja Žumer is speaking tomorrow at the Workshop on Ontology-Driven Interoperability for Cultural Heritage Objects in Pisa. Her talk is called “FRBR: Is This the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship?” The description of the workshop says, “More and more people involved in the management and description of digital objects in the Cultural Heritage domain face similar problems when deciding on the most suitable metadata schema and conceptual reference framework to adopt. This workshop aims at bringing together experts in the field (both theoreticians and practitioners) to discuss what needs to be done to encourage the adoption of suitable standards that cover the current and emerging needs of the Cultural Heritage digital objects.” Only 30 people can attend so if you’re not already in Pisa and booked for it, it’s probably too late.