The FRBR Blog

My colleague Tim Knight reminded me something good. You all know of Karen Coyle. She’s on the RDA mailing list and early in July she said something ominous that will have you musing over the weekend:

We are still having a lot of trouble with FRBR Group 1 entities. This is a good example of what doesn’t work when a standard is defined on rather than in a rigorous, testable way. Until we actually start trying to use FRBR in practice we have no way of testing it to see if the idea really works. FRBR is now almost ten years old and still hasn’t really been tested. It is possible that some parts of it don’t actually work. There are folks trying to express FRBR in RDF, and others working to express it as an object-oriented structure. Both seem to be running into problems (that I cannot claim to understand). I am uneasy about adopting FRBR as the basis for our metadata until it has been proven. I don’t see an obvious mechanism of feedback that would result in adjustments to FRBR if it does turn out to need to be changed. Should we be treating it as gospel? No, at the moment it’s a theory, but still just a theory. Think of what we risk if that theory is wrong.

That’s the last paragraph of her e-mail; for the whole thing, scroll down to 3 July 2007 in this archive file.

Next week, I’ll catch up on pointing out some papers.

Xiaoming Liu sent some mail to the xISBN mailing list t’other day announcing some improvements.

Here’s a demo of xISBN. Just go there and press the button. (Excellent choice of manifestation and work, says I.) The “author” and “publisher” attributes in the results are new.

Liu included a link to these xISBN statistics: 14,940,275 ISBNs have been grouped into 11,840,205 work sets.

In 2001 in The Concept of a Work in WorldCat: An Application of FRBR (353 KB PDF), Bennett, Lavoie, and O’Neill (all of OCLC) said: “The average work in WorldCat has approximately 1.5 manifestations, indicating that for the most part, works in WorldCat are small, single-manifestation entities. More than 25 million of the 32 million works in WorldCat (78%) consist of a single manifestation. Ninety-nine percent (99%) of all works in WorldCat have seven manifestations or less, and only about 30,000, or 1% have more than 20 manifestations.”

Liu posted numbers showing what they know now about works and manifestations:

• Text showing how many records have a given number of manifestations
• Graphical respresentation of the above

This is only manifestations with ISBNs, and the earlier analysis looked at all manifestations in WorldCat. Liu said on the mailing list, “Our result shows that average work has 1.26 manifestations. More than 86% works consist of a single manifestation. And more than 99.5% of all works have seven manifestations or less.”

Marshall Breeding points out their test implementation of Ex Libris’s new catalogue application, Primo: code-named Alphasearch, it is “the first time that a live Primo implementation has been made available to the general public.”

It does some manifestation grouping. Here are some search results for The Three Musketeers. Notice the link “11 versions in 3 languages published between 1893-1976.”

I find the interface awkward, especially its insistence on doing everything as a search, so I’ll leave further exploration up to you.

I’m a month late in pointing this out, but it’s still of interest. Tim Spalding explains it all and has links on the Thingology blog: Bedford Public Library adds LibraryThing for Libraries. The FRBRy part of it is that LibraryThing’s way of grouping manifestations into works means that if you’re looking at a book in the catalogue you also get links to other manifestations of the same work. Great if the book you want seems to be checked out, but actually there’s a hardcover edition available you hadn’t noticed before.

Things get FRBRy in the comments on Steve Lawson’s blog post A Study of Scanning Habits. “Book” means a lot of different things, and the work, expression, manifestation, and item concepts can help narrow down what aspect of “book” one means.

New Library Standard Aims to Simplify Resource Discovery for Researchers is a post by the Ball State University Library (in Indiana) that explains FRBR: “Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records (FRBR), popularly pronounced Ferber, is trying to end that frustration by providing the means for a better organization of displays of various versions of the same work in library catalogs.”

Don’t miss this one, chums, it’s filled with good stuff and it’s freely available to all: the August/September 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2 MB PDF) has a special section on FRBR. It’s edited by Yin Zhang.

The contents are available individually in HTML or PDF:

• Introduction, by Zhang
• Introducing the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and Related IFLA Developments, by Pat Riva
• Understanding FRBR as a Conceptual Model: FRBR and the Bibliographic Universe, by Allyson Carlyle and Lisa M. Fusco
• From a Conceptual Model to Application and System Development, by Athena Salaba and Yin Zhang
• Understanding Support of FRBR’s Four User Tasks in MARC-Encoded Bibliographic Records, by Shawne D. Miksa
• FRBR: The End of the Road or a New Beginning, by Maja Žumer
• Critical Issues and Challenges Facing FRBR Research and Practice,
  Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba

Thanks to Gary Price and Glen Wiley for pointing it out.

Christine Schwartz blogs at Cataloging Futures. She’s planning on doing some posts on the new RDA draft and FRBR, and she started yesterday with RDA Takes FRBR Seriously: Revised Chapter 6. She says “It’s thoroughly FRBRized,” and “Unfortunately, a heavy handed application of the FRBR conceptual model gives this chapter (and chapter 7) a theoretical tone. It’s hard to wade through and may be hard to apply on a day-to-day basis for cataloging/metadata creation.”

I’ll post links to any further FRBR-related stuff she posts, of course. You might want to follow it yourself, directly or through Planet Cataloging.

UPDATE: Today she’s posted RDA Takes FRBR Seriously: Revised Chapter 7.

First, John Cowan’s Extreme Markup 2007: Thursday, a blog post from 13 August about the Extreme Markup Languages 2007 conference in Montreal.

On Wednesday I talked about the nocturne on naming, but it was actually held on Thursday. Much of it was spent discussing the FRBR model of works, expressions, manifestations, and items. For computer-document purposes, a work is the abstract work, e.g. Hamlet; an expression is a particular kind realization, like a particular edition of the text or recording of a performance; a manifestation is the expression in a particular format such as .txt, .html, .doc, or .avi; and an item is a particular copy residing on a particular server, disk, or tape. Ideally, there should be separate URIs for each of these things.

From there to FRBR, A.L.I.C.E., Organs and Other Extremities, a blog post by Danny Ayers on 15 August. He’d read Cowan’s post, quotes the bit above, and says:

Another paper he mentions talks about describing a pipe organ using topic maps. I need to read this properly sometime soon, there’s an obvious overlap with what I want to do for describing the Tinocaster in RDF (grr, I forgot, that server’s not got its data back yet – link to be fixed soon). As it happens, looking at that took me (with the aid of various Talisians) down the path of using FRBR – how to do a music store, and more generally looking at describing (manufactured) products, prompting the coinage FRPR.

You read that right: FRPR is Functional Requirements for Product Records. Check out the example. Interesting.

Here’s a book to look out for when it’s released next month: FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Robert L. Maxwell, “senior librarian and section head for the Special Collections and Metadata Cataloging Section at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.” I don’t know anything about the book but I’ll certainly read it as soon as I can. If you review it anywhere, let me know and I’ll post a link. A whole book about FRBR is exciting news!

Cataloging expert Maxwell offers clear concise explanations for every librarian interested in the next phase of access to their library’s digital information. He answers such questions as

• What is FRBR and how does it work?
• How will FRBR affect libraries?
• Do all librarians need to be concerned, or just those doing cataloging?
• How do authority records fit into the picture?

With an understanding of the FRBR model, public and academic librarians, technical and public services librarians, and administrators can get a jump on this vital new cataloging technology to make catalogs more user-friendly.

With this and Arlene Taylor’s Understanding FRBR, that’s two books on FRBR coming out this fall. It’s ten years since the Final Report came out, but more and more is happening.