The FRBR Blog

You know about xISBN, the OCLC service that takes in an ISBN and gives back a list of ISBNs of other manifestations of the same work.

Now, meet xISSN: “To use the service, you submit an ISSN embedded in a URL to the xISSN server, and the server returns a list of associated ISSNs and relevant metadata. ISSNs for different editions of the same serial are grouped together. An ISSN group may also have historical relationships with other groups.”

The xISSN API looks nice, but you need a working WorldCat Affiliate ID to use it, so I can’t put up any nice sample links here.

Updates have been a little slow recently but I should be back on schedule now. I’ll catch up on all the exciting FRBR-related news of the last few weeks.

Aaron Swartz was at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School on Tuesday and gave a talk about what the Open Library is doing and how it’s going. David Weinberger was there and blogged it. If you listen to the audio recording of Swartz’s talk(58 MB MP3) then you’ll hear that at about the seven minute mark he talks about FRBR. The Open Library plans on FRBRizing its collections, and from the sounds of it they’ll go beyond the usual stuff when they do relations betweens different entities. Excellent. Around the twenty-five minute mark, there’s a question about FRBR and how the relationships will be chosen and made. The whole thing is worth a listen.

UPDATE: Around thirty-six minutes in, Greg Crane is asked a question and some interesting stuff follows.

Chris Oliver is head of Cataloguing Services at the McGill University Library in Montreal, and she’s also chair of the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, the alliteratively named “national advisory committee on matters of cataloguing and bibliographic control” that represents Canada at the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (and, formerly, on changes to AACR).

Feliciter is the magazine sent to members of the Canadian Library Association.

Chris Oliver + Feliciter 53:7 (2007) + Resource Description and Access = Changing to RDA (744 KB PDF).

The article caused some discussion on mailing lists and blogs. FRBR and FRAD are mentioned. I quote a four lines:

One of the most important documents for the library user is one that the user is probably totally unfamiliar with … This entity-relationship model, known as FRBR, focuses attention on how the data in records relates to what a user needs … FRBR has illuminated the deep bones of the bibliographic record and has underlined the centrality of the user’s needs. It has changed the perspective on cataloguing from a cataloguer looking at a record in isolation to a user seeking the record within the context of a large database or catalogue.

Christine Schwartz doesn’t like that line about the perspective: “I find this statement insulting.”

The morning of Saturday 13 October 2007, the end of Access 2007, was a comparative hotbed of FRBR activity compared to the previous days: your favourite IFLA-created entity-relationship model for organizing bibliographic entities, and mine, was mentioned twice.

Peter Binkley gave a talk called “Searching the OPAC: The State of Play.” “In the past few years libraries have started to take action on their dissatisfaction (and their users’ indifference) towards their OPACs. The concurrent emergence of options for search interfaces outside the ILS and the wide adoption of Web 2.0 applications by our users have provided both a carrot and a stick. This session will examine the current range of possibilities for improving search functionalities in, around and begainst the OPAC.” (Begainst!?) He mentioned FRBR as part of “clumping,” one of the things catalogues do to help users. It was a good overview of where things are at in catalogues and what new things are being done.

Right after that was Joshua Ferraro, president of LibLime, with “Open Source Software as a Service.” He talked about his company, open source in libraries, Koha, how buying support for open source applications work, etc. (There had been a lot of talk at the conference about Evergreen, so it was good everyone got a chance to hear about Koha too.) He said one Koha-using system was using OCLC’s xISBN to bring together different manifestations of the same work. I think the example he showed was the Athens County Public Libraries in Ohio. That link will show you Hamlet, with an Editions tab.

Another thing of interest was a demo of a digitized scrapbook. Here are some rough notes about it for the conference, here’s a link to the digitized Dodds scrapbook, and here’s Scraps, the tool used to do it all. The Image Markup Tool is a Windows app where users can mark out boxes on images and add metadata. It’s very impressive, and the talk was great. I mention this because while they were showing the scrapbook, I thought, “By Jove, FRBRizing this thing would be a hell of a job. I wonder what the Working Group on Aggregates would make of this.”

I’m at the Access 2007 conference in Victoria, British Columbia. An informant reported that FRBRization (in a loose sense) was mentioned by vendors at the How to Skin an OPAC: Integrating Users with the Social Web preconference. There was no mention of FRBR in the first day of the conference, though I did have a chat with William Moen about the MARC Content Designation Utilization project. It’s a very interesting project for many reasons, one of which is the help the MARC usage analysis will give to FRBRization projects that try to mine MARC records and winkle out “this and this are two different manifestations of the same expression of a work that must be called X” inferences.

In Names (such terseness is rare in blog post titles), Pete Johnston talks about The Names Project, which “is going to scope the requirements of UK institutional and subject repositories for a service that will reliably and uniquely identify names of individuals and institutions.”

Talking about names? Talk about, you guessed it, Functional Requirements for Authority Data!

As part of my pre-meeting truffling, I had a look at the (relatively) recent draft of the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) specification. FRAD is another product of IFLA, and it is a sibling document to, or extension of, the (probably better known) Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) specification. More specifically it’s the product of an IFLA group called the “Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR)”, with the rather confusing (to the outsider) consequence that the acronym FRANAR is sometimes used to refer to this area of work too, but I think the intent is that the model is referred to as FRAD.

Like FRBR, FRAD describes an entity-relational model, with the focus of FRAD on the entities related to "authority data" rather than to the “bibliographic record” itself. IIRC, I had looked at an earlier draft of FRAD quite some time ago, but the current version seems to have come on a long way from that version, and – from a fairly cursory reading on my part – it looks as if it may be a very useful document, both for those (like the Names project) seeking to develop applications in this area, but also for the non-librarians (like me) who want to have a better understanding of librarians’ conceptualisations of the world, e.g. the relationships between persons (or personas), names, and access points.

AUTOCAT’s archives are public now, which is great. Last week Donna Gray-Williams posted Confused About RDA & FRBR, and got some interesting replies.