The FRBR Blog

Mark Lindner regularly posts on his blog Off the Mark about what he’s been reading. In Some Things Read This Week, 21-27 October 2007 (I’m still catching up on old posts), he points out “Tomorrow Never Knows:” The End of Cataloguing? (337 KB PDF) by Alan Danskin, a paper given at the IFLA 2007 conference in Seoul.

Lindner comments:

I agree that this is an important argument to make but we are in such an awful situation to make it currently. I wonder to what extent this is being fixed in RDA. I’m not too hopeful really. Tillett’s relationships made it into the RDA to FRBR mapping and they say a mapping of RDA to FRAD is due.

But these sorts of relationships and mappings cannot be afterthoughts if they are to work as they should; they must be integral to the system from the beginning. Even if they are being added mid-way that is not the same. JSC documentation says that they considered FRBR from the beginning. Perhaps. But the main problem is that FRBR (as a complete E-R model) is not complete. Both FRBR and RDA is being done piecemeal. And we are to get a coherent system from that process?

Go down into the comments at the bottom of the page for some more interesting stuff.

I bet you read Karen Coyle’s blog already, and if you don’t you should, but I’ll keep on linking when she mentions FRBR because that’s what I do. In Wednesday’s Hierarchy v. Relationships she says at the end, after discussing works, expressions, and manifestations:

The truly interesting relationships in FRBR are those between and among these entities, and those are ones that I have not seen explored. These are the relationships between things: thing1 is a translation of thing2; thing3 is an abridgment of thing4; thing5 extends thing6 in this certain way; thing7 cites thing1; thing8 continues thing3. This is where we get real value, where we provide various interesting paths through which seekers can navigate. This is what we don’t provide explicitly in our catalogs today, although a human user may be able to intuit some of these relationships among the works we present.

We have so narrowly defined bibliographic control in libraries that it doesn’t really include the relationships between intellectual products, except to the degree that we might make a note that one thing is a translation of another thing. But we see those relationships as “extra” or “secondary,” and yet they are the very essence of knowledge creation. It astonishes me that we have focused so completely on the physical items that we have essentially missed what would make our catalogs intelligent.

Preach it.

Pete Johnston the British metadata expert (not Pete Johnson the American boogie-woogie piano player, though metadata goes well with a left hand like God laying out eight to bar) posted Images DC Application Profile Working Group on Hallowe’en.

I haven’t really worked much with metadata for images, and I’m not that familiar with the models in use in that domain. Polly and Mick circulated a draft model based on the VRA Core, which made a primary distinction between the types/classes Work and Image. This prompted a good deal of discussion, both from the viewpoint of whether that model really addressed all the use cases at hand (e.g. Does it handle the “born-digital” case? And if a digital image in a scientific publication is generated from data, what is the (VRA Core) Work?), and also as to how well it “fitted with”/mapped to the FRBR model (on which the ePrints/SWAP profile was based)- the VRA Core concept of “Work” is not the same as the FRBR concept of the same name. This in turn raised the broader question of whether these various DC application profiles should be framed within some shared, over-arching model.

On re-reading the introduction to FRBR this morning, I note that the section on "Scope" does state:

The study endeavours to be comprehensive in terms of the variety of materials that are covered. The data included in the study pertain to textual, music, cartographic, audio-visual, graphic and three-dimensional materials

so at least some classes of image were considered as in scope by the developers of FRBR. I’d be interested to receive any pointers to/comments on any experiences of applying the FRBR model to graphical resources. I’ll forward any comments received here to the project.

Yesterday I noted a blog mention that Bowker is selling access to “ISBN clusters.” Coincidentally, yesterday Jonathan Rochkind posted DLF Forum, Bowker Presentation, about a talk he saw at the Digital LIbrary Federation 2007 Fall Forum:

I learned about the plans for an International Standard Text Code (ISTC), sort of like an ISBN but applies at the FRBR “expression” level, grouping a set of ISBNs. (Although Bowker seems to call what it applies to a ‘work’, it is in fact meant to apply only to things that are ‘textually identical’, which is what we call the expression level. It is also only meant to apply to textual material, not audio, video, etc. She claimed that audio and video already had something similar, although it wasn’t widely adopted. I know nothing about this?) This would potentially be quite useful, of course, to have an expression level identifier from the ISBN people. It also makes me think of how it might harmonize or not with the library world’s plans for ‘frbrization’–it’s being done for the needs of the publishing and sales industry, like ISBN. Of course, right now there’s not much for it to harmonize to in the library world, just talk.

I’d never heard of this before, or if I had, I’d forgotten it, which is always a possibility. Turns out the International Standard Text Code has a web site. The about the ISTC page explains:

The International Standard Text Work Code (ISTC) is a numbering system developed to enable the unique identification of textual works.

… [A textual work is a] work comprised primarily of words; for example, an article; an essay; a novel; a poem; a screenplay; a short story. The ISTC identifies the text of the work itself. It does not apply to physical products or other manifestations of a work (such as an edition of a book; an article printed in a journal; a talking book; or the electronic versions of such products).

… How does a “work” differ from an “expression”?

An expression is the specific intellectual or artistic form that a work takes each time it is “realized.” Because the form of expression is an inherent characteristic of the expression, any change in form results in a new expression. Similarly, changes in the intellectual conventions or instruments employed to express a work (e.g. translation from one language to another) result in the production of a new expression…”

For the purposes of assigning ISTC, this relationship is covered by the term derivation. For that reason and to prevent any confusion, the term “expression” is not used in the ISTC standard.

There will be charge to register a textual work and get a number, and note this approach to finding out if a number already exists for an expression:

How does someone know if an ISTC has been issued for a given text?

As soon as an ISTC has been assigned to a work, the Registration Agency will notify the interested parties involved. If there is delay due to questions arising from the registration process, an acknowledgement of the ISTC request will be sent. A central database of assigned ISTCs can be queried to determine if an ISTC has been previously established for a textual work.

Some dates on that web site show that approval of the ISTC as a standard got delayed, but it looks like it just happened a couple of months ago.

Who’s writing the standard? Well, it’s Project 21047 of Working Group 3 of ISO TC 46/ SC 9, a cryptic name for a working group of a subcommittee of the Techinical Committee of the International Standards Organization. (You know how international standards bodies are, or if you don’t, that’ll give you an idea.)

Final Report of Voting on ISO Draft International Standard 21047, International Standard Text Code (76 KB PDF) is from 14 September 2007 and says that the standard has been approved and “should proceed directly to publication as an ISO International Standard.” So we should expect to hear more about this over the next few months.

It will be interesting to see how well a central, commercialized service works, and how it can be used with other open expression-level identifiers, when they arise. If it helps FRBRize everything, it’s good.

The AquaBrowser blog wrote up FRBR In AquaBrowser last month. “Several different FRBR techniques are being road-tested at new AquaBrowser sites. Do you have an opinion on the most beneficial approach?” Includes links to three sites doing FRBRy things inside AquaBrowser.

Says there that Bowker is selling access to “ISBN clusters,” much like, I presume, xISBN and thingISBN. Hmm!

Karen Coyle’s blog post Bibliographic E-R from last Sunday is about entity-relationship models. FRBR is set up as an entity-relationship model (though FRBRoo recasts it in an object-oriented model). Coyle notes:

This type of model is expressed in FRBR, but the E-R aspect of FRBR does not seem to be incorporated into RDA as it stands today. Instead, RDA appears to be aimed at creating the same flat structure that we have in library data today.