The FRBR Blog

The International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) had the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (NASKO) here in Toronto from 14-15 June 2007. I didn’t get to it, but blogger Mark Lindner did, and wrote up comments on the talks.

Here he quotes or paraphrases Rebecca Green, if I read it right, who with Nancy Fallgren wrote Anticipating New Media: A Faceted Classification of Material Types:

IFLA FRBR folks did some wonderful work in their documentation. They also blew a few things, some of which are because they wanted to keep it simple, some perhaps because they were too close to the issues and document, while others may have been due to a compromise … or a mixture. The Expression entity is one such failure.

I haven’t read “Anticipating New Media” yet, but it looks very interesting. It’s freely available, so go have a look and leave a comment.

All of the other conference papers are online, too.

Julian Everett Allgood, a cataloguer at New York University Libraries, has an article called “Serials and Multiple Versions, or the Inexorable Trend Toward Work-Level Displays,” in the new Library Resources & Technical Services (July 2007, 51:3). Here’s the abstract:

The proliferation of multiple versions for bibliographic works presents numerous challenges to the cataloger and, by extension, to the cataloguser. Fifteen years after the Multiple Versions Forum held in Airlie, Virginia, online public access catalog (OPAC) users continue to grapple with confusing displays representing numerous serial manifestations (i.e., versions) resulting from the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules’ (AACR2) cardinal principle (Rule 0.24). Two initiatives offer hope for more coherent OPAC displays in light of a renewed focus upon user needs: the ongoing revision of AACR2, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions’ Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model. A third potential tool for improving OPAC displays exists within a series of standards that have developed to parallel library needs, and today offer a robust communications medium: the MARC 21 authority, bibliographic, and holdings formats. This paper summarizes the challenges posed by multiple versions and presents an analysis of current and emerging solutions.

Rule 0.24 has changed over various revisions of AACR, and Allgood gives the old version and the new one. As of 2002, Rule 0.24 reads, “It is important to bring out all aspects fo the item being described, including its content, its carrier, its type of publication, its bibliographic relationships, and whether it is published or unpublished. In any given area of the description, all relevant aspects should be described. As a rule of thumb, the cataloger should follow the more specific rules applying to the item being cataloged, whenever they differ from general rules.”

“Carrier” refers to the medium used for the publication: Can I get the article I want online, or do I have to go to the shelf and find the right issue of the journal? Allgood says, “Users are more interested in obtaining the journal article content than in the manifestation-level details of the serial title in which the article is published.” Very true!

For an earlier and oft-cited paper about this issue, read Content vs. Carrier by Lynne Howarth.

I don’t know a word of Swedish, so I can’t read Jakob Nylin Nilsson’s master’s thesis Att Identifiera Uttryck (“To Identify Expressions”). Luckily for me there’s an English abstract:

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the possibility to identify the FRBR entity expression from existing catalogue records performed within the context of Swedish cataloguing rules. The empirical study uses a sample of records from the catalogue within the library at the University College of Borås. To begin with, the thesis reports some of the earlier discussion about the FRBR model. That gives an understanding of which problems the model has and justifies the study’s delimitation towards expression. The research questions in the study ask to what extent it is possible to distinguish expression, what fields that identify the entity and if descriptions of particular types of media and publication are different in respect of expression. For an understanding of the empirical material the study uses categories fetched from the article FRBRization: A method for turning online public finding lists into online public catalogs written by Martha M. Yee. The result shows that expression can be identified in a large part of the material. At the same time, the result shows a clear difference between descriptions of monographs and serials, respectively. They are different both in respect of to what extent expression can be distinguished and which fields that identify the entity. One possible interpretation of the result is to understand the concepts in FRBR as roles rather than things. That seems to be able to solve some of the problems that are connected with the model.

I read David Weinberger‘s new book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder recently and I recommend it. If you use del.icio.us, Wikipedia, and Library Thing, it won’t all seem brand new or earth-shattering, but it’ll get you thinking about some things in new ways. Others may get freaked out. The more people that start thinking about this way of working, the better.

It’s not perfect. Sometimes it’s disjointed, as though assembled from smaller parts; I think it needed more one more close edit. Even a book about miscellaneity requires a solid backbone. There are two almost identical mentions of an Umberto Eco quote that stand out strangely. Nevertheless, there is much interesting in the book.

Everything Is Miscellaneous mentions FRBR in the “What Is a Book?” section that begins on page 118 of my manifestation (Times Books, 2007). Weinberger talks about Hamlet and all the variations and versions of it, and quotes Thom Hickey, of OCLC fame when explaining xISBN. Then on pp. 122-123 there’s a bit about FRBR.

Huzzah to Weinberger for exposing FRBR to a wider audience!

The 2007 American Library Association conference was on last week. Here are the FRBR-related events I could find out about. If you know of others, please add a comment. On the Saturday program is listed a session called “Informing the Future of MARC: An Empirical Approach,” with William E. Moen, Shawne D. Miksa, and Sally H. McCallum.

Did you know that catalogers use only 10-20% of available MARC fields/subfields? Given evolving search behaviors and the amazoogle effects, do our bibliographic records provide information users need? This program presents findings from a major IMLS-funded research study on catalogers’ use of MARC and an opportunity to discuss future directions for MARC and cataloging practices in the context of FRBR, RDA, and XML. The study’s results provide a needed empirical basis to inform MARC’s future.

At the Networked Resources and Metadata Interest Group, Jennifer Lang saw Diane Hillmann talk about Dublin Core and RDA.

This change will help move us from silos around data – for us and other people who are interested in our data and will allow us to incorporate FRBR relationships to provide clarity and help display issues. Extensibility will be much easier (Hillmann said “technically, maybe not socially”).

There were a some posters I’d like to have seen. Judy Jeng did Metadata Usefulness Evaluation, where she examines how well the user tasks serve user needs:

This study evaluates metadata usefulness of the Moving Image Collections using FRBR’s identified four tasks (find, identify, select, and obtain) as a framework. The study involves two online surveys, one experiment, and one formal usability test. A total of 138 subjects participated in this study from April 2003 until July 2004. The study uncovers what metadata fields are useful in different stages of information retrieval. Subject Headings is ranked the most useful field to Find an item, Title is the most useful field to Identify an item, Access Restriction is the most useful field to Select and to Obtain an item. This study found what information is “enough” for each of the user tasks….

Seungmin Lee and Elin Jacob did Construction of a Conceptual Structure as a Mediator between MARC and FRBR:

Currently, both MARC and FRBR have faced with problems in describing information resources. MARC is limited in describing the dynamic nature of information resources because of its rigid and single-layered linear structure. FRBR does not provide sufficient descriptive elements to fully represent bibliographic entities, although it can support the representation of multi-layered characteristics of information resources. This research has constructed a conceptual structure that can connect between the heterogeneous systems of MARC and FRBR to make up for these weaknesses….

Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba did Current FRBR Model Implementation Efforts and Issues in Library Catalogs:

Since its inception, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) has been embraced by library communities and is shaping the direction of future cataloguing rules, standards, and consequently, library practice and system development. In particular, the FRBR model was developed considering user tasks, which offers great opportunities for creating retrieval systems that better support user information seeking. However, FRBR is essentially a conceptual model open to a variety of interpretations and implementations. Current FRBR implementation efforts have been largely exploratory in nature….

(Poster sessions are where people make up big posters, with text and images, describing something they’ve done or are investigating. They stand around in front of them ready to chat with you if you’re interested. You can walk along, giving the posters a quick look, and stop and examine one closely if it strikes your fancy.)