Pride and Prejudice 4: FRBR Display Toolkit
In Pride and Prejudice 3: MARC I told you about how I had superduped my copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, got 792 ISBNs, queried open Z39.50 servers around the world, and retrieved MARC records for 383 of those manifestations.
That’s a nice chunk of data to work with. “What,” I hear you cry, “will we do with it?” “We’re going to bung it into Library of Congress’s FRBR Display Tool and see what happens,” I reply. “Right ho!” you say.
Here’s a brief extract about the tool. Make your way over there to read the whole thing and poke around.
The FRBR Display Tool … is an XSLT program that transforms the bibliographic data found in MARC record retrieval files into meaningful displays by grouping the bibliographic data into the “Work,” “Expression” and “Manifestation” FRBR entities….
The FRBR Display Tool sorts and arranges bibliographic record sets using the FRBR model. It then generates useful hierarchical displays of these record sets containing works that consist of multiple expressions and manifestations.
The tool is very flexible. Because the tool is written in XSLT, it is easy to augment based on an institution’s individual needs. Likewise, the output may be augmented by simply changing the XSL stylesheet that controls display. No change in the XSLT program is needed.
The tool does not search bibliographic databases to create the record set on which it operates. A retrieved file (e.g., an OPAC search result) of MARC unit records must be created before using the tool.
We have the MARC records so we’re set to begin.
If you want to follow along at home, please download the FRBR Display Tool and get it working for next week. It requires Java.
The toolkit includes some Java JAR files and other things, including MARC2FRBR.BAT, a DOS or Windows batch file. That’s no good to me (I run FreeBSD) so I made a shell script replacement, marc2frbr.sh.
As it happened, while processing the MARC records I ran into various problems, which I’ll describe and solve next week. I ended up installing Saxon 8.9 to get around one of them. You’d be best off to install it too. For it, I made another new version of the batch file, new-marc2frbr.sh.
I worked through this at the command line on my Unix box, and that’s what I’ll show, so if you’re not using a Unix or a Linux, you’ll have to figure it out yourself or just follow and see the results.
“Strike me pink,” you say. “Do you mean you’re going to take those 383 MARC records and FRBRize Pride and Prejudice before my very eyes?”
Yes!