The FRBR Blog

Christine Schwartz’s blog post of yesterday, Catalogs/Cataloging Memes, says, “We ignore bibliographic description to our own peril. Its primary purpose is the identification of library materials and isn’t ‘identify’ one of the FRBR user tasks?” She points to The Catalog’s Last Stand (PDF), by Norm Medeiros, from which I quote:

Timothy Burke, Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College (PA) and presenter at the aforementioned Library of Congress meeting on the future of bibliographic control, describes vividly the tension between accommodating the desires of users and staying true to the catalog’s guiding principles:

“I worry a little about the idea that the singular driving force in catalog reform is to seat King User on his throne, to depose the wicked expert viziers who have kept the king from knowing what he wants to know. I worry that it replaces the wicked vizier with a fawning courtier.”

There’s much hope that FRBR will “fix” online catalog problems, a heavy burden to place on such a complex conceptual model. If FRBR doesn’t collapse under the weight of these great expectations, can it strike a balance between user needs and catalog righteousness in the RDA era? No matter the outcome, this seems the catalog’s last stand, the Rocky VI of catalog revision. How will it end?

Patrick Vanhoucke talks about a FRBR presentation he saw (I think) in his blog post Informatie 2007 – Dag 2.

Nog net de tijd voor een koffietje en dan naar de eveneens druk bezochte presentatie van Rosemie Callewaert (VCOB) over FRBR. Dat letterwoord spreek je uit als [feurbeur] (het lukt me hier niet om de juiste fonetische tekens weer te geven) en staat voor Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Het is een theoretisch concept dat beschrijft hoe grote gegevensbestanden beter doorzoekbaar kunnen worden gemaakt.

Neil Godfrey, of the Metalogger blog, posts FRBR and Metadata Decisions for Respository Users, a good introduction to what FRBR means to someone who looks after an institutional repository.

Till now I have always tried to avoid anything that looked too heavily into FRBR discussion because it seemed too abstract and complex to mean anything to the here and now job on my desk. An article about a Dublin Core Application Profile for Scholarly Works (based on FRBR and the Dublin Core Abstract Model) also looked like it should be interesting but again I found myself wanting to relate it to my work but not seeing how to — yet.

But after DC-2007 I think I am beginning to see the light. It’s about positioning ourselves for the future. And the future is being introduced bit by bit now with work on RDA, and especially with the working together by RDA and DCMI now. It’s also about positioning repositories for the semantic web.

From the news page about Variations 3, “an integrated digital library and learning system for the music community:”

A new report, Definition of a FRBR-based Metadata Model for the Indiana University Variations3 Project, is now available for review. This report defines, for the purposes of discussion, what a FRBR-based metadata model for digital musical audio recordings, bitmapped score images, and encoded score notation would look like. Please send comments to Jenn Riley.

In an announcement sent to a mailing list for music librarians, Jenn Riley said, “The Indiana University Variations2 and Variations3 projects use a work-based metadata model for discovery of musical sound recordings, scanned score images, and encoded score notation files. This model has been described as ‘FRBR-like’ and is mentioned in various discussions of FRBR-based systems, but it is not technically a FRBR implementation.”

Last month I saw a demonstration of Siderean‘s Seamark Navigator, which they call a “relational navigation server” but which you can think of as a sort of RDF search engine. It looked pretty impressive, believe me.

Bradley Allen is the Chief Technology Officer at Siderean, and he was doing some of the demo. There were a couple of questions about FRBR and he gave informed answers. One thing he said really caught my attention and set me to tugging thoughtfully on my beard. He said:

work + facets = expressions = manifestations + tags

By facets he means not the facets that come from a faceted classification system, but the kinds easily divined from MARC records: year of publication, call number range, format (book, music, video, map), language, subject headings, etc.

Last Wednesday in a blog post titled Faceted Classification and FRBR he talks about this after redefining the Group 1 entities!

• An item is a unique physical embodiment of a work (i.e., a singleton set).
• A work is a set of items with the same intellectual content.
• An expression is a set of items with the same realization of intellectual content.
• A manifestation is a set of items with the same production history.

This set of definitions allows us to shift the burden of effort in creating a FRBRized catalog from defining specific entities of the four classes with explicit relationships from one level to the other (which, I believe is the assumed work process) to simple entry of values for facets associated with production, realization and intellectual property metadata on a per-item basis.

I point out something in the ngc4lib mailing list (“next generation catalogs for libraries”) archives every now and then. You might want to join the list. Thursday Jenn Riley, a music librarian, sent a comment in response to Jim Weinheimer:

I think it’s important to remember that FRBR is a *conceptual* model. The entities in FRBR don’t necessarily have to be “records” in a catalog the same way we have records today, individual screens or tabs a cataloger has to interact with. It’s certainly simple from a system point of view to make records that match FRBR entities, but even if we do this, it doesn’t mean that a cataloger has to manually create or even *see* each of these records. It could all be handled from a simple screen indicating formats, or even just generating format information from files on a file system. We need good (or even reasonable?) UI design for cataloging interfaces, even more now than ever before. The cataloging interface does *not* have to mirror the underlying database structure. Ditto the end-user interface.

If you follow the link in the Subject line you can see the whole thread, which is about a digitized version of Cutter’s Rules (which I couldn’t see in Google Books but could see here).

Vive Cutter! Vive Ranganathan! Vive Lubetzky!

Two days ago I quoted something that cited Patrick Danowski’s 2006 blog post Warum del.icio.us für Bibliothekskataloge untauglich ist. As you might suspect from the title, it’s in German. Good news for those of you who read English but not German: Danowski has translated it! Translation: Why del.icio.us Is Ineffectual for Library Catalogs. Danke!

Cast your minds back, back, back into the mists of time, all the way to May 2006, and you may recall that I mentioned a North American Serials Interest Group conference where Steve Shadle and Paul Weiss did a talk on “FRBR In the Real World.”

Now it’s in print in The Serials Librarian 52: 1/2, May 2007: FRBR In the Real World.

Abstract: Brief refresher of the main aspects of the FRBR model, a review of various uses of FRBR, and a discussion of how the group 1 entity types apply in a serials context. We focus on levels (work/expression/ manifestation/item and whole/part), the number of entities in particular situations, and terminology. Examples of real-world serials are used to illustrate how the FRBR resource model applies to serials.

Here’s a short paper I just came across: National Libraries and the Semantic Web: Requirements and Applications, by Lars G. Svensson. (You may get a warning about an SSL certificate, but don’t fret.) It was given in February at the 2007 International Conference on Semantic Web and Digital Libraries in India.

A nice paragraph:

It has been pointed out, that permalinks from a single library only offers the possibility to comment on or tag a catalogue record from that library (Danowski, 2006). If, however, the library records relate to the national library’s authority record, comments and tags can be shared among instances of a particular publication. If the FRBR model is used, it will even be possible to differentiate the annotations between the physical items (“pp 50-55 are missing”), the manifestation (“a typographical error on p 238”), the expression (“the translator has totally misinterpreted the meaning of ‘synd om’”) or even complete works (“James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is hard to read”).

The Danowski cite is to Warum del.icio.us für Bibliothekskataloge untauglich ist. Google can translate that into English but it does a bad job of it.

Jodi Schneider pointed out something Allen Renear recommends: Implementing FRBR: A Comparison of Two Relational Models: IFLA’s FRBR Model and Taniguchi’s Expression-Prioritized Model (558 KB PDF), a 2004 master’s thesis by Einar Silset Berg.

ABSTRACT: Two relational data models are implemented and compared. One is based on the FRBR model proposed by the IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, and the other is based on a model proposed by Professor Shoichi Taniguchi, entitled ”the expression-prioritized model”. The two models’ abilities to handle documents that consist of different types of component parts are discussed. The bibliographic data from the discussed documents are filled into the databases and the physical consequences are discussed. The results show that the expression-prioritized model might be an improvement of the FRBR model. It gives a smaller database with less redundancy, yet it can reflect the same aspects of a document as the FRBR model.