The FRBR Blog

The Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, or WoGroFuBiCo, is having their second meeting on 9 May in Chicago. The topic is “Structures and Standards for Bibliographic Data” and the agenda is up on their site. I’m sure FRBR and FRAD will be mentioned.

Christine Schwartz’s blog post First Meeting of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control has a fistful of useful links about the first meeting.

Before doing The Hobbit, here’s an interesting and short example of superduping an omnibus. (Omnibus editions are example of “aggregates,” an unsettled subject in the FRBR world.) It doesn’t spiral out of control, but it does, shall we say, expand beyond its borders.

I have in hand Captain Hornblower RN, which contains three of the Horatio Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester: Hornblower and the Atropos, The Happy Return, and A Ship of the Line. Penguin did all the Hornblower novels in three omnibus editions: The Young Hornblower, this one, and Admiral Hornblower. They arranged them into internal chronological order, not publishing order. My item is an exemplar of the the seventh impression of the Penguin manifestation of 1987. The ISBN is 0140081771. The copyright page says it was first published this way by Michael Joseph in 1965.

If we query thingISBN for 0140081771, we get back a cluster of four ISBNs: 0140081771, 0316288934, 2258039622, and 3548256554.

If we query xISBN for 0140081771, we get back two ISBNs: 0140081771 and 5859590202.

Let’s superdupe and group together all fragmented clusters at both services by comparing ISBNs back and forth.

The first ISBN is the one we started with, and it’s known to both services so it’s added to the superdupe array.

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs      Title
0       T       0140081771                      Captain Hornblower RN

The next one isn’t known at xISBN.

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs      Title
1       T       0316288934      3       1 + 0   Captain Horatio Hornblower
2       T       2258039622      2       1 + 2   Capitaine Hornblower (fre)

Line 2 opens up a cluster at xISBN: 2258039622 and 2258039614. They are Capitaine Hornblower, a French translation.

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs      Title
3       T       3548256554      1       2 + 4   Hornblower, Der Kapitän (deu)

That German edition opens up a cluster of four at xISBN: 0140008357, 0141027053, 3548024815, and 3548256554. Now that we’ve run through all of the numbers from thingISBN, we start running through the ones from xISBN and looking them up at thingISBN.

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs      Title
4       X       0140008357      0 + 9   5       The Happy Return

Interesting. This ISBN, which we got from xISBN in the Hornblower, Der Kapitän cluster, opened up a cluster of nine books at thingISBN. They are: 0140008357, 0141027053, 0316289329, 0523003854, 0523407351, 0523413904, 0718104692, 0736606548, 1859989969. The Happy Return is one of the novels in the omnibus, and it’s not unexpected that it would turn up. Someone wanting to the read The Happy Return could find it in Captain Hornblower RN. Someone wanting the omnibus edition would probably be as happy with the three individual novels, and perhaps all they really need is one of the three.

Things continue apace for a little while:

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs      Title
5       X       0141027053                      The Happy Return
6       X       2258039614      7 + 0   3       Capitaine Hornblower (fre)
7       X       3548024815      7 + 0   2       Der Kapitän (deu)
8       X       5859590202      7 + 0   1       Kapitan Khornblouer (rus)

But now we get Beat to Quarters, which thingISBN clustered with The Happy Return. Why? It’s not part of this omnibus. The LibraryThing work information page shows that people have grouped the two together as being the same work. This may be because of an older omnibus edition that does group the two novels.

Now we run through a bunch more manifestations of Beat to Quarters and a couple of The Happy Return, and something in Swedish.

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs      Title
9       T       0316289329      7       0 + 5   Beat to Quarters
10      T       0523003854                      Beat to Quarters
11      T       0523407351      5       3 + 0   Beat to Quarters
12      T       0523413904      4       3 + 0   Beat to Quarters
13      T       0718104692      3       3 + 0   The Happy Return
14      T       0736606548      2       3 + 0   Beat to Quarters
15      T       1859989969      1       3 + 1   Hornblower and the Happy Return (audio)
16      X       0736688986      0 + 0   3       Beat to Quarters (audio)
17      X       0736691286      0 + 0   2       Beat to Quarters (audio)
18      X       9137058126      0 + 0   1       Order Och Kontraorder (swe)

I was expecting that Hornblower and the Atropos and A Ship of the Line (the other two novels in the omnibus) would show up as individual works, but they didn’t. I didn’t do any deep investigation into this, to check how xISBN handles aggregates or what LibraryThing users do with such collections. One possible cause may be that omnibus editions are far more popular than individual ones, at least during the ISBN era.

Instead, because of what may be some overzealous grouping by a LibraryThing user Beat to Quarters came into the mix. It isn’t part of the omnibus in hand, and if we wanted to keep to just Captain Hornblower RN we’d have been better off not superduping. On the other hand, it certainly is related and of interest to the reader, so no harm is done. Perhaps it would help the user. Ideally, a catalogue would tie together all the Hornblower novels and the various omnibus editions so they are all easy to navigate.

Combining and deduping: 5
Superduping: 19 ISBNs
thingISBN: 4 at start; 8 calls; 9 ISBNs added; 6 unknown
    xISBN: 2 at start; 10 calls; 12 ISBNs added; 5 unknown

Superduping other omnibuses might show the constituent works being pulled out, but I’ll stop with this.

By the way, Forester’s Hornblower stories are all excellent and I recommend them.

I’m going to go on to some larger examples of superduping, but first I’m going to take a sidestep and bring in a new tool that will make it easier to see what’s going on.

I’m a regular listener of the excellent CBC show Ideas. It’s broadcast weeknights in Canada (anyone anywhere can listen to the streaming audio feed) but they also put up a show each week on their podcast feed.

Last week was the third and last episode of In Other Words (23 MB MP3), produced and presented by Barbara Nichol. It’s about literary translation. Nichol talks to translators about the relationship between the translation and the original work: is it like a writer doing a stage adaptation of a novel? Like a musician performing a composed piece of music? Like an actor performing a character on stage, reading the writer’s words but with his own inflections and actions?

You know what those all are: different expressions of the same work. The translators agree that doing a translation is like being an actor performing someone else’s work. There are cases where there is special inspiration, though, when the translation becomes its own work of art. In FRBR, are some translations their own works? Alexander Pope’s translation of The Iliad is a good one to consider this way, I think.

I recommend downloading the show and keeping FRBR in mind while you listen. If you like good radio, subscribe to the podcast feed.

The curtain rises. Stage right is a large red couch. Stage left is a plain wood desk and a simple wood chair. There is a lamp behind it. A large mirror stands on the floor between the couch and desk.

FRED, a librarian, enters, stage left. He is wearing a black suit. He crosses the stage, stopping to look in the mirror. He adjusts his tie, then turns to the audience.

FRED: Today is the first in a possible series of one-act plays dramatizing blog postings.

FRED goes to the couch and lies down, then turns his head to face the audience.

FRED: Recently Dan Chudnov posted Technical Requirements for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records on his blog.

DAN CHUDNOV enters stage left and stands at the edge of the stage.

DAN CHUDNOV: It’s a real problem that we have a bunch of people ranting about MARC and RDA and what’s cool about FRBR, but we have very little positive direction about what’s needed from descriptive and other cataloging/metadata from a technical perspective to build good systems. There are a lot of people doing cool work with Solr and replacement OPAC demos these days, so maybe we can start to document a set of unit tests or use cases or functional requirements.

DAN CHUDNOV exits.

SALLY, a librarian with a Manitoba accent, is lowered from the flies and slowly descends to centre stage. She turns on the lamp, then sits behind the desk.

SALLY: Anyone interested in FRBR should be on the Resource Description and Access mailing list. There is more FRBR- and FRAD-related traffic there than on the FRBR mailing list, though of course any FRBR person will want to be on that too.

FRED (sitting up and facing SALLY): Recently there have been interesting comments there from Martha Yee, Karen Coyle, and Jonathan Rochkind.

SALLY: Rochkind posted his e-mail on his blog, too: Two Meanings of “Identifier”. It’s a follow-up to Martha Yee’s comments on FRAD.

FRED: Which are available in the list’s archives, and well worth reading.

SALLY (standing and moving to centre stage): A blogger named Nichole posted FRBR of Love a week ago. She uses love as a way of explaining what FRBR is.

FRED: That’s one of the most unusual explanations of FRBR I’ve ever seen.

SALLY: FRBR. Love.

SALLY and FRED hold out their hands to each other, but are too far apart to touch. They do not move. The curtain falls.

Here’s an example of how superduping and the thingISBN and xISBN services can go slightly wrong. The item in hand is my copy of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg. It was first published in 1967, and won the Newbery medal the next year. My item is an exemplar of, if I read the copyright page correctly, the forty-third impression of the Dell Yearling edition first published in 1977. The ISBN is 0440431808.

If we query thingISBN for 0440431808, we get back a cluster of 29 ISBNs. If we query xISBN for 0440431808, we get back a cluster of 34 ISBNs. I won’t show them all.

Here’s some of the output from my superduping script. I’ll include the title if it’s not what we expect. First, we check the ISBNs that thingISBN gave us.

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs
0       T       0140306811
1       T       032111583X      28      33 + 2  Final cut pro 3 for Macintosh

The first ISBN is in both initial result sets, so it’s moved to the superdupe array. The second ISBN isn’t in xISBN’s result set, so it’s checked over there, and found to be part of a cluster of two ISBNs. But the book is Final Cut Pro 3 for Macintosh! What the heck?

I’m not sure what’s going on. The LibraryThing page for this work shows 032111583X as the ISBN of a 1974 Atheneum hardcover manifestation. It’s the last in the list on the left-hand side, and if you follow the link there you can look up the book at various book-selling services. Notice the cover LibraryThing shows is for Final Cut Pro 3 for Macintosh, and notice too that if you follow the links to the booksellers you get some strange results. I searched listings at BookFinder and it appears there was a 1974 hardcover edition from Atheneum, but the ISBN was 0689205864.

So somehow the ISBN of a whole other work got into our list. Let’s see what happens. Those ISBNs will be queried at xISBN, so maybe things will spiral out of control.

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs
2       T       0333100646
3       T       0333462874
4       T       0395732514      25      32 + 1  Explore

The fifth ISBN checked from thingISBN’s initial result set hadn’t been checked at xISBN, so we check it, and find it’s a singleton. This means that it either is a singleton, or that xISBN knows nothing about it. Why does it say the title is Explore? Look up 0395732514 at WorldCat and you get three different listings! There’s the book we have in hand, a series (I think) called Invitations to Literacy, and whatever Explore is. The cover shown is for a Beverly Cleary book.

“I’m dashed confused,” I hear you say, and so am I. I have no idea what’s going on. Here are some points of interest from the rest of the output. Some other unrelated book comes in, and then we get into some non-English books. The Dutch one, Het Wonderlijke Archief van Mevrouw Fitzalan, must be a translation of our book, but I don’t know if the others are the right book or something else. (Sorry about the character sets not displaying properly.)

24      T       0807275565      5       17 + 1  Discovery packs of learning (eng)
...
37      X       8205104719      0 + 0   6       To rømlinger og en engel  (nor)
38      X       8906501692      0 + 0   5       Kʻu�llodia u�i pimil = (kor)
39      X       9021471272      0 + 0   4       Het wonderlijke archief van mevrouw Fitzalan  (dut)
40      X       9510008230      0 + 0   3       Vanhan rouvan salaiset paperit  (fin)
41      X       9510043346      0 + 0   2       Vanhan rouvan salaiset paperit  (fin)
42      X       9570803193      0 + 0   1       Base fu ren di dang an chu  (chi)

Final results:

Combining and deduping: 42
Superduping: 43 ISBNs
thingISBN: 29 at start; 15 calls; 0 ISBNs added; 14 unknown
    xISBN: 34 at start; 9 calls; 9 ISBNs added; 0 unknown

So after all of that we only got one new ISBN that we wouldn’t have had by just combining and deduping. It’s 382731755X, incidentally, which xISBN clusters with 032111583X. It’s another edition of Final Cut Pro 3 for Macintosh. At least three of the ISBNs are not for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and the number may be higher, depending on what the non-English books are. Whether we superdupe or just combine and dedupe, our data sources are mixing in some wonky results.

Conclusion: Sometimes this stuff just doesn’t make sense. Remember what the Stoic sage Epictetus advised two thousand years ago: “Some things are up to us and some are not.”

Next up: Jane Austen, Frodo Baggins, or Horatio Hornblower spiral out of control.

Here’s a simple example of superduping working well. We’ll start with an item in my collection, my copy of the 2005 HarperCollins trade paperback manifestation of Flashman on the March, the latest in the series of novels by George MacDonald Fraser about the outrageously libidinous and cowardly scoundrel Harry Flashman. The ISBN is 0007201532. It’s a UK edition; I ordered it from over the pond because the release here was delayed by six months or so.

If we query thingISBN for 0007201532, we get back a cluster of five ISBNs:

000719739X
0007197403
0007201532
1400044758
1400096464

And if we query xISBN for 0007201532, we get back a singleton of just one ISBN:

0007201532

xISBN’s one result is also in thingISBN’s results, so xISBN’s cluster is a proper subset (fully contained in and not equal to) of thingISBN’s. This doesn’t happen often, and it shows some kind of problem or lack of information in how xISBN does its clustering. Happily, we can use the human-generated thingISBN cluster to improve results.

Notice that if we combine and dedupe the results, we just end up with thingISBN’s cluster.

Here’s how we’ll superdupe it. I’ll show the output from my superduping script and explain it line by line. We start off with two arrays of ISBNs, ts and xs, which at the start are set equal to the result sets. (They are pronounced tees and exes, as in t-plural and x-plural.) Whenever an ISBN is in both arrays we’re going to remove it from both and add it to the superdupe array. If it isn’t in both, we’ll look it up at the other service.

The Super column is how many ISBNs are in the superdupe array when this iteration starts. Source is T if the ISBN is coming out of ts and X if it’s coming from xs. The ts and xs columns show how many ISBNs are left in each array.

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs
0       T       000719739X      5       1 + 1

Explanation: Start with superdupe empty, with 0 items. Start with the thingISBN numbers (T) and take the first ISBN from the sorted list: 000719739X. Right now there are five ISBNs in ts and 1 in xs, that is, our original unaltered result sets. Look up 000719739X at xISBN and get back one ISBN: 000719739X, the one we queried about. xISBN doesn’t have anything clustered with it; it’s another singleton. The + 1 means we add that ISBN to xs because now we have checked it at xISBN. Then, because that number is in both arrays (it was in ts to start with and we just added it to xs), delete it from both arrays and add it to superdupe. Now superdupe has one ISBN in it, as shown at the start of the next line, and ts has four and xs has one.

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs
1       T       0007197403      4       1 + 4

When this ISBN is looked up at xISBN, a cluster of four come back! They are:

0007197403
1400044758
1405611154
1405621028

All of these are pushed onto xs. The first two were in thingISBN’s initial result set (in fact, the first is the one we queried about), but the last two are new. This is the third cluster of xISBN results we’ve seen so far (two singletons plus this) and we are using thingISBN’s cluster to group them all together. That’s superduping! Remove 0007197403 from both arrays and push it onto superdupe, which now has two numbers.

Super   Source  ISBN            ts      xs
2       T       0007201532
3       T       1400044758
4       T       1400096464      1       2 + 1

Three more ISBNs pulled out of ts. The first two above are also in xs, so there’s no need to look them up at xISBN. They are deleted from ts and xs and pushed onto superdupe. (The counts for ts and xs aren’t there partly because of where things get printed in my script and partly because nothing interesting happens so I don’t bother reporting it.) The third line there, for 1400096464, shows that it’s the last ISBN in ts (the 1 under ts) and that we have two in xs, plus one added by querying xISBN about 1400096464 and getting another singleton back. Remove 1400096464 from both arrays and push it into superdupe.

Now comes the really interesting part as we run through the ISBNs remaining in xs. These are ISBNs that were part of xISBN result sets but that we have not yet seen or checked at thingISBN. Just as we checked thingISBN-generated ISBNs at xISBN, now we will check xISBN-generated numbers at thingISBN.

5       X       1405611154      0 + 0   2
6       X       1405621028      0 + 0   1

But we don’t find anything interesting. The + 0 shows that thingISBN doesn’t even know about these numbers, much less have any more clusters of numbers to give back. If it had, we’d have pushed those numbers onto ts and started over again, back and forth until all numbers have been checked everywhere.

The results:

Combining and deduping: 5
Superduping: 7 ISBNs
thingISBN: 5 at start; 3 calls; 0 ISBNs added; 2 unknown
    xISBN: 1 at start; 4 calls; 6 ISBNs added; 0 unknown

Combining and deduping gave us five ISBNs but superduping gave us seven. That’s not a huge improvement, but I suspect this is all of the existing manifestations.

We made three calls to thingISBN and four to xISBN. Two ISBNs were unknown to thingISBN, and none were unknown to xISBN.

“How do I know all those ISBNs really represent manifestations of Flashman on the March?” I hear you cry. I checked, and they do. But that’s not always the case, as we’ll soon see.

My supderuping experiments were interesting in a few different ways, and I’m still trying some things out and hacking my scripts. I’ll give a few examples over a few days.

First, a brief introduction. Let’s consider Ross Thomas’s novel The Seersucker Whipsaw. My item of this work is an examplar of the 1985 Perennial Library paperback manifestation, which is an embodiment of the author’s final edited text. The ISBN is 0060807288.

If we query thingISBN for 0060807288, we get 3 ISBNs back:

0060807288
0060808497
0446401692

And if we query xISBN for 0060807288, we also get 3 ISBNs back:

0060807288
0060808497
0446401692

The two results sets are identical. Nothing further need be done. That was simple, eh? As far as we can tell, this work has had only three manifestations.

In fact that’s false: these are all paperbacks, respectively from 1985, 1987, and 1992. The first edition was published by Morrow in 1967. Why isn’t it included in the results? It doesn’t have an ISBN! It was published too early to have one. That first ISBNless manifestation is out of luck and won’t show up in any xISBN or thingISBN results.

“That isn’t fair,” I hear you cry. It isn’t. Books that predate International Standard Book Numbers get the cold shoulder from xISBN and thingISBN, which, as you may have noticed from their names, are about ISBNs. “How do we get around that?” I hear you ask. Every work, expression, manifesation, and item will need to have a unique identifier. If one exists (like an ISBN for a manifestation), we can use it. If none exists, we’ll have to make one up and have everyone agree on it. (Or make up several and map them from one to the other.)

For the second example, let’s use another Ross Thomas novel, The Fools In Town Are On Our Side. (The title is from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”) My item is an examplar of the 2003 St. Martin’s trade paperback reprint, ISBN 0312315821. The first manifestation was published in 1970. It’s one of his best novels and has been reprinted more than The Seersucker Whipsaw.

If we query thingISBN for 0312315821, we get 4 ISBNs back:

0312315821
0380006871
0445405600
0445408677

And if we query xISBN for 0312315821, we get 8 ISBNs back:

0312315821
0340127376
0380006871
0417052502
0445405600
0445405619
0445408677
3548014402

The 4 thingISBN numbers appear in xISBN’s result set. In set theory lingo, one might say that xISBN’s results are a proper superset of thingISBN’s.

If we combine and dedupe the results, we’ll get 8 ISBNs, all the ones from xISBN. What would superduping give us? Might it find more?

As it turns out, no. Here’s what happens:

First run through ISBNs in thingISBN result set
0312315821 is in xISBN's result set
0380006871 is in xISBN's result set
0445405600 is in xISBN's result set
0445408677 is in xISBN's result set
Now run through the ISBNs in xISBN's result set
The above four have been examined already; don't look at them again
0340127376 is unknown at thingISBN
0417052502 is unknown at thingISBN
0445405619 is unknown at thingISBN
3548014402 is unknown at thingISBN

thingISBN can’t give us any leads on new ISBNs. Four ISBNs were known to both places; their clusters sort of lined up. We knew four other ISBNs, from xISBN, and threw them at thingISBN, but we didn’t turn up any previously undiscovered manifestations.

So in this case, combining and deduping gives the same results as superduping. “That’s boring,” I hear you say. Next time I’ll give examples of where superduping breaks apart clusters and gives more complete results. And I’ll show examples of how this can fly out of control and go haywire.

I know you’re excited about superduping, and so am I, but hang in there. Today, I’m catching up on some recent mentions of FRBR on other blogs.

• John Fudrow’s Widgets, Widgets All Around, But Will They Click the Link? about LibraryThing for Libaries;
• Jenny Levine’s More on Comments in Hennepin’s Catalog shows an example of FRBR in action: comments on books are tied to the work, not the manifestation.
• John Fudrow’s Library Catalog 2.2: Tell Me What I Want, and I’ll Tell You What I Think follows up on Levine’s nicely: “I feel the most interesting aspect of this so far is the use of FRBR concepts to keep user thoughts centralized. If someone doesn’t realize the benefit of such a methodology, just envision how hard it is to talk intelligently about something if you aren’t even sure you are talking about the same thing.”
• Frédérick Giasson’s The Bibliographic Ontology explains a new project “to develop a new citation and bibliographic references ontology.” There’s a mailing list for it, and FRBR got mentioned early on: Bruce D’Arcus saying “I actually like FRBR, even if I don’t want to actually have to encode all the complicated relationships (it gets messy for a lot of citation stuff)!”
• Laura J. Smart, at Repositories for the Rest of Us, posted b.o.o.k. & RDA: “The point of the rant is my opinion that literate people will need to radically reconceptualize our collective notion of the book in order to make full use of books of the future. For librarians, this should go hand in hand with our use of FRBR and RDA.”
• An anonymous U of Alabama student posted Promissory Note: “But now it turns out all this beautiful syndetic and collocative structure buried in MARC records that FRBR is able to extract and express hierarchically can also be used to build inference structures.”

A brief note: I got my superduping script working and next week I’ll post some results. With it, I take an ISBN and check thingISBN and xISBN to get the ISBNs that they cluster with it as being other manifestations of the same work. Instead of combining and de-duping the results, as I did before, I run through the ISBNs one by one, and if an ISBN has only been seen at one service I look it up at the other and grab all of the ISBNs that were clustered with it. All of those ISBNs will be new, and I can check on them back at the first service. I go back and forth, using each service’s results to break apart the fragmentation at the other service, forming a maximal superset of ISBNs. This process I call superduping.

When I combined and de-duped the results for my copy of The Hobbit from thingISBN (217 ISBNs) and xISBN (5) I got a total of 221 ISBNs. xISBN’s number was so low that obviously it didn’t have the ISBN of my manifestation grouped in with others. By superduping, I got over 1200 ISBNs! That kind of result won’t happen often, but even for more common works the results were interesting. More on all this next week.

Functional Requirements for Authority Data: A Conceptual Model (second draft) (931 KB PDF) is available for download from IFLA‘s Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records. (That name is why you see FRANAR mentioned sometimes, but while the group kept the old name, their model is called FRAD).

1. Purpose

In libraries, in museums or in archives, a catalogue is a set of organized data that describes the information content managed by the institution. To group the various works by one person or one corporate body, or the various editions of a same work in that catalogue requires controlled access points for authors and titles. These controlled forms represent authorized forms and variant forms, in a given catalogue, for names and titles, which collect together all the forms of a given author’s name or of a given title. So the concept of “authority control”, which means both management of authorized forms and identification of the entities that are represented by those access points, is integral to the concept of “catalogue”. Authority control is beneficial to cataloguers who are able to see at a glance all the access points to an authorized form that exist in a catalogue and to identify quickly the entity. Even more importantly, it benefits end users who can use any form of the author’s name or of the title in their searches to retrieve the resources described in the catalogue.

The primary purpose of this conceptual model is to provide an analytical framework for the analysis of functional requirements for the kind of authority data that is required to support authority control and for the international sharing of authority data. The model focuses on data, regardless of how it may be packaged (e.g., in authority records).

More specifically, the conceptual model has been designed to:

• provide a clearly defined, structured frame of reference for relating the data that are recorded in authority records to the needs of the users of those records;
• assist in an assessment of the potential for international sharing and use of authority data both within the library sector and beyond.

FRAD gives us some new entities to consider: Name, Identifier, Controlled Access Point, Rules, and Agency. The draft explains them all and how they all relate. In the Relationships section (starting on page 35) they use little stick figures to show how people are connected. I like them.

After the first draft was out for review, “the Working Group met in The Hague in December 2005 to resolve some 145 pages of comments received from 12 individuals and 13 institutions (including 6 national libraries and 3 national-level cataloguing committees).” Comments on this draft will be taken until 15 July 2007.