The FRBR Blog

Colette Mak’s The Importance of FRBR makes the good point that one of the important reasons for using FRBR is to avoid confusion about all the different Harry Potter editions. She did this two-page introduction to FRBR (61 KB PDF) for libraries in her state.

I used Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in an example, and Ian Davis turned it into RDF. I hope to do even more FRBRization of Harry Potter. The books (and movies, and soundtracks, and games, etc.) are a large but finite set of things to organize, all from the last ten years, so they present interesting but surmountable challenges.

From Karen Coyle’s Copies, Duplicates, Identification:

In at least three projects I’m working on now I am seeing problems with the conflict between managing copies (which libraries do) and managing content (which users want). Even before we go chasing after the FRBR concept of the work, we are already dealing with what FRBR-izers would call “different items of the same manifestation.” Given that the items we tend to hold were mass produced, and thus there are many copies of them, it seems odd that we have never found a way to identify the published set that those items belong to.

Frédérick Giasson’s Modifications and Things to Consider is a sample of the e-mail going around the Bibliographic Ontology Specification Group. That’s where they talk about the Bibliographic Ontology Specification, which sometimes uses FRBR concepts in its arrangements.

Amigos Library Services is new to me, but they’ve been around for quite a while as a group of libraries in the southwestern United States helping each other. Yesterday they announced FRBR-Applied WorldCat Comparison and said, “Individual subscribers now have the option of applying elements of the FRBR algorithm to your WorldCat comparison via the FirstSearch Administrative Module.” I’m not quite sure what that means, but there you have it.

FRBRization is planned as part of The Open Library (just opened in demo mode) from the Internet Archive. This is wild stuff. Go look at it.

This year’s International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions conference is in Durban, South Africa, 19-23 August. The FRBR Review Group will be meeting there, and when they post their reports and minutes I’ll let you know.

If you’re going to the conference, you may want to stick around an extra day for the Library and Information Association of South Africa’s Interest Group for Bibliographic Standards day of events where one of the speakers will be the tireless Barbara Tillett on Resource Description and Access and FRBR.

Allen Renear and David Dubin are proposing a paper for the 2007 ASIST conference in October. (Or perhaps it’s been accepted. I’m not sure.) The abstract for Three of the Four FRBR Group 1 Entity Types are Roles, not Types says:

We examine the conceptual model of the “bibliographic universe” presented in IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and argue, applying the ontology design recommendations developed by N. Guarino and C. Welty, that three of the four Group 1 entity types should be considered roles (relationships) rather than types. We then show how this analysis generalizes the solution to a previously identified puzzle in entity type assignment and is supported by John Searle’s notion of a cascade of social facts established through collective intentionality — which we take to be confirmation that this re-factoring results in a more accurate picture of the bibliographic domain. Finally we make some suggestions as to why it seemed that these entities were types rather than roles and note that in specific applications there may in fact be good practical reasons for models that treat types as roles.

Sounds very interesting! I hope it gets posted online, and perhaps someone will blog the conference session. You’ll recall Allen Renear from the paper he wrote with Yunseon Choi, Modeling Our Understanding, Understanding Our Models.

From 30 May, Métadonnées: Faut-il Parier sur RDF (Resource Description Framework)? It’s an interview with Yann Nicolas discussing RDF, FRBR, other standards, and metadata in general.

As you might guess from the title, it’s in French. My French isn’t good enough to read it all, but perhaps yours is. (I didn’t know that données means “data.” Donner is “to give” but I don’t know the etymology. Si vous le connaissent, ajoutez un commentaire.)

Here’s the interview run through Google’s translate tool and turned into bad English. (Yesterday I pointed you to a Norwegian’s Ph.D. thesis which he wrote in English, so I think you can put up with a bad translation of a short French interview today.)

Trond Aalberg has been mentioned here four times (one, two, three, four), but I just found out, thanks to someone tagging it at del.icio.us, that his 2003 Ph.D. thesis is online: Supporting Relationships in Digital Libraries (2.1 MB PDF). Chapter nine (starting on the page number 149, number 165 in the PDF) is called “The FRBR Application.” Again I must admit I haven’t read what I’m posting about, though the diagrams and tables look interesting. If you’ve read it, feel free to post a comment.

An announcement was sent to OCLC’s xidentifier-l mailing list about some updates they made to the Library Lookup bookmarklet, which uses xISBN to make it so that if your web browser is displaying something about a book, you can press a button and see if your local library has a copy. Pretty handy. If you’re looking at a book at Amazon, knowing you can have a copy (though perhaps a different manifestation) of it waiting at your local library branch in a couple of days will make you rethink whether you really need to buy it.

I haven’t tried the new system, and there was some discussion about it on the list; it was reported that the current system is not the final one, so if you’re going to do any serious work with it, get on the list and ask.

Ultimately, what we want are tools so that whenever someone mentions a book, CD, DVD, work, expression, whatever, we will have simple tools that will let us find, identify, select, and obtain an item of some suitable expression and manifestation of that work. (Perhaps the exact manifestation mentioned.) “The Three Musketeers is one of the greatest adventure novels ever written, you say? Let me press a button and see my options. Ah, new Pevear translation from Viking, available for sale for $24.99 but my library has it and I can pick it up right now, or I can get the Richard Lester movie on DVD in the shop on the corner.” This tool is one step towards that.