The FRBR Blog

Chew Chiat Naun, “FRBR Principles Applied to a Local Online Journal Finding Aid,” in Library Resources and Technical Services, 51:2, April 2007.

Chew explains an initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that produces an Online Research Resources (ORR) registry, an online journal finding aid that uses data feeds and a locally-developed system to offer users a supplementary catalog for online resources. He considers the treatment of work-to-work relationships, as embodied in FRBR, in relationship to the ORR.

I haven’t read it, but I see that Mark Lindner read it in April. He’s a student at Shampoo-Banana, where Naun is a professor.

I haven’t mentioned this before, and I’m not sure how I found out about it, but here’s a link: The Canonical Text Services Protocol.

The Canonical Text Services protocol defines a network service for identifying and working with texts. CTS joins the conceptual model of “texts” described by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (or FRBR) with a hierarchical model of canonical citations that is traditional in many areas of the humanities.

The Canonical Text Services protocol defines a hierarchical scheme of “works.” As in FRBR, the “work” is a conceptual entity: an abstract idea of the content expressed in all versions of a work, in the original language or in translation, but in CTS, the work’s original language is specified. CTS organizes works in “groups” that have no direct parallel in FRBR. Groups organize works according to traditional citation practice. They may reflect authorship (e.g., a work entitled Huckleberry Finn might belong to a group named “Mark Twain”), or may represent some other kind of corpus (e.g., a work numbered 1 belonging to a group named “Federalist Papers”). Works may include specific versions, called “expressions” in the FRBR model; in CTS, these are identified as either editions or translations, with language of translations explicitly identified. These expressions may in turn be represented by specific exemplars, or “items” in FRBR parlance.

Beyond identifying works, as the FRBR model aims to do, CTS provides a hierarchical model for citation of sections of a work. A prose work like Herodotus’ Histories might be organized in a book/chapter/section scheme, or an epic poem might be cited by book and line.

Jonathan Rochkind (a name you may recognize from comments on this blog) posted Expression and Manifestation on his own blog a couple of weeks ago, and I’m just getting around to pointing it out now. He says, “Random musings on the two confusing/controversial FRBR Group 1 entities, which started out as a comment on another forum, but I figure, hey, why not put it here.”

The Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (as they will be known) had a meeting last month in Ottawa and the minutes and such are now available on their web site: Outcomes of the Meeting of the Joint Steering Committee Held in Ottawa, Canada, 16-20 April 2007. One of the outcomes is that they’re going to change their name. The committee is made up of cataloguers, and it’s amusing to wonder what implications of this action, cataloguing-wise, ran through their minds as they decided to change the name of their corporate body. Well, it’s somewhat amusing. I grant you it’s not as funny as the one about the man from Madras.

The meeting happened before the RDA/Dublin Core get-together in London and it mentions some preparation for that, along with much else.

Today it’s my great pleasure to give you Diane Hillmann’s answers to the Four FRBR Questions. She’s a major figure in the metadata world, and if you’ve ever done a Dublin Core project you probably pored over her Using Dublin Core guide while deciding what to do.

She’s done a lot this year, and it’s only May. She’s been in the FRBR news because she was at the RDA and Dublin Core sit-down in London at the start of the month (on the DC side of the table). She’s been writing for the Library and Information Technology Association blog about the WoGroFuBiCo meetings. Her January paper with Karen Coyle, RDA: Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century, attracted a lot of attention. There’s a short biography of her on the D-Lib site, matched with that article.

When did you first hear about FRBR?

I read the report when it first came out and was very intrigued by it, and have followed discussions about it since. I think my first attempt to apply it was with serials, which is kind of like starting out a mountaineering hobby with Mount Everest. I also attended the 2005 FRBR Workshop which was extremely helpful.

What’s your involvement with it now?

My current interest is as co-chair of the newly formed DCMI/RDA Task Group, which will be moving forward the recent agreement between the RDA developers and the Semantic Web communities (see http://www.bl.uk/services/bibliographic/meeting.html for the original announcement).

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

More concrete applications using FRBR! OCLC has done good work pushing the envelope with their FictionFinder project and in developing their FRBR Work-Set Algorithm. It’s also been great seeing that the use of FRBR has moved into non-library venues, such as the new Eprints Application Profile. I think the second thing that the FRBR world needs most is to recognize that it’s not really necessary for all the communities using FRBR to agree on the boundaries between the Group I entities in order to make FRBR work for us generally. So long as we know WHO SAYS this or that is a work, or an expression, etc., we should be able to cope. This notion that all must agree before we move forward has been a significant impediment, it seems to me.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

I have actually had to explain FRBR to programmers and developers, most of whom are not librarians, so I should feel more capable of this than I actually do feel most of the time. I would start by saying that FRBR is a way to think about how created resources change and morph over time, and how those changes can be described. There’s lots more to it, of course, but that’s how I’d start.

(Digression: I was at the FRBR Workshop — I started this blog right after — but I didn’t meet Diane Hillmann there. If you look at the photograph of everyone at the workshop (requires Flash) then you can see her in the second row, second from the right; just behind her left shoulder is Lynne Howarth of the University of Toronto (who recently stepped down from the FRBR Review Group) and just behind Howarth’s left shoulder is me!)

My thanks to Diane Hillmann for taking the time to answer the questions. She’s the fifth person in the Four FRBR Questions series. Previously:

• August 2005: Patrick Le Boeuf
• August 2005: Pat Riva
• January 2006: Barbara Tillett
• Feburary 2007: Martha Yee

LibLime works on and sells support for the two big free and open source integrated library systems, Koha and Evergreen. In More Web Services: FRBR, xISBN, ThingISBN last week they announced that the Nelsonville Public Library added a module to their Koha installation that makes an Editions tab in their catalogue. It uses xISBN and thingISBN. (Nelsonville is a town in Ohio, in the United States.)

There’s even a nice set of system preferences to manage this new feature. They allow the library to turn the feature on/off, specify whether or not to use ThingISBN, and throttle the number of queries to the xISBN service, ensuring compliance to the terms of the free service (499 queries per day).

If you look at their entry for one of the manifestations of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and select the Editions tab you’ll see links to five other manifesations of the work (and one of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets).

Congratulations to the Nelsonville Public Library and all others involved! I don’t know if this plug-in will be made available to others, but I hope it is. A mention of it may turn up on the library’s web page about Koha and their use of it.

Earlier this month Jennifer Koerber reported on Bill Moen’s talk on The Future of MARC at a conference.

That comes out of the MARC Content Designation Utilization project, which Moen and Shawne Miksa are running. They’ve put up some information up about the Extent of Support for FRBR User Tasks. Interesting.

William Moen was mentioned here last September in another post about the user tasks.

Following up again on the RDA and Dublin Core collaboriation announcement, here’s a link to DCMI Abstract Model and RDF by Bruce D’Arcus.

If I had a recommendation for the DCMI, it would be to drop the Abstract Model and use RDF. It would save a lot of technical and evangelism work. I’ve said this before, but the Abstract Model offers completely unconvincing value to me. It has a model that is essentially equivalent to RDF, and yet the claimed advantage that it has a non-RDF XML syntax. But the problem is that this syntax is even uglier and more complicated than RDF/XML!

Danbury Library is the public library in Danbury, Connecticut, a city of about 80,000 people which is currently punching above its weight in the library world because it’s the first system to implement LibraryThing for Libraries, the new service offered by LibraryThing.

It looks very nice. Here are some sample pages:

• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. (Strangely, the book is sixth in the result list for “azkaban,” but that’s because of their catalogue’s search, nothing to do with LibraryThing.) Note the “Other editions and translation” section, which links to the movie on DVD (a related work), the book read by Jim Dale (different expression), and the Spanish translation (different expression). There’s also a link to another Harry Potter book, which is a mistake but easily corrected. This is now a semi-FRBRized catalogue! LibraryThing also supplies links to related books and tags, which you’ll want to look at.
• They only have one item of The Hero with a Thousand Faces so there’s nothing FRBRy there.
• They have four items that are exemplars of a particular manifestation of Pride and Prejudice, and it links to an audiobook and what seem to be literary criticism, but not the movie. As with Harry Potter, searching for “pride and prejudice” shows movie results before the books.

Those are the first three books I tried, and the FRBRization isn’t perfect, but I’m not complaining. Congratulations to the Danbury Library and LibraryThing on getting this implemented! There’s a lot more going on than just the FRBRization, of course, but I’ll leave that to others to discuss, and will just say that it’s very nice work that all other libraries will want to ponder.

This isn’t the end of the Pride and Prejudice experiment, so stay tuned. Today, a break for some comments. Coming up over the next few days are some pre-loaded posts so that I don’t have to work over the Victoria Day weekend.

• What do you make of the FRBRized Pride and Prejudice results? The blanks at the start come from the non-English records that I obliterated, I think. Some non-Roman characters got wiped out, too, such as in Chinese and Swedish titles. For some manifestations the language is known, for others not. Sense and Sensibility got into the mix, as discussed earlier. LC’s algorithm did a pretty good job with the manifestations of the standard English expressions of the works, but translations, collections, and critical editions didn’t come out quite as well.
• And what do you make of the FRBRized Harry Potter series?
• There are a lot of ugly MARC records out there.
• I don’t know a thing about character encodings in MARC records but I’m going to need to learn.
• The world needs a good web-based MARC editor. I would like to be able to upload a file containing multiple MARC records and have a nice Web 2.0 tool parse them all and let me edit them, delete them, or add new ones, and then export a fresh new MARC file. This would be far easier than me grunting through scripts full of ugly late-night hacks. If you’re looking for a good web-based, Ajaxy project with some Ruby, Python, or Perl on the back end, consider making the world’s first free web-based MARC editor. (Those of you who can run Terry Reese’s MarcEdit may not feel the same need.)
• The Library of Congress’s FRBR Display Tool needs to be robustified so it can withstand heinous MARC records, but it’s still a fine piece of work. My thanks to the Library of Congress for creating it and making it available!
• The Java part of the LC’s FRBRization process can be replaced and the same XSL used. More on that next week.
• There’s OCLC’s FRBR Work-Set Algorithm to consider. How do they compare?
• How can they work together? How would results from one complement, support, and improve the other’s?

I plan to load the FRBRized Pride and Prejudice and Harry Potter data into OpenFRBR. When that happens, I’ll post more. I think it will be a very interesting step. In the meantime, all comments are welcome about the experiment so far, the FRBR Display Tool, the results, etc. Leave a note here, or on your own blog with a trackback.