The FRBR Blog

From the December archives of the ngc4lib mailing list in the Martha Yee threads, which got into music. Dramatis personae: Karen Coyle, Jonathan Rochkind, and Rob Styles.

Karen Coyle said on 5 December:

So you could have:

A is a performance of Z
C is an arrangement of Z
F is a performance of C

All of these seem to be legitimate statements, although they may not map precisely to the FRBR Group 1 entities. I think this is an example of what I’ve been arguing — that it’s more important to establish the relationships than it is to fit everything into a set number of levels.

Jonathan Rochkind replied:

They can be legitimate statements despite those relationships not being the ‘canonical’ Group 1 to Group 1 relationships! FRBR does not limit you to one and only one kind of relationship only between one Group 1 entity and it’s immediate hiearchical superior!

In the above list, A is an expression. Z is a work. C is an expression. F is also an expression. Expression F may be related to Expression C with a “is a performance of” relationships—-that relationship may or may not be in FRBR right now, but should be! FRBR certainly allows you to draw relationships between one expression and another, or one work and another, or one exprsesion and a work other than it’s parent work, etc.

The specific list of relationships in the FRBR document (which may not include ‘is a performance of’, but may include some more generic category of this), the FRBR document all but admits was just an initial sketch of what relationships were possible, and was not meant to be definitive or complete. That we haven’t actually done work to polish off this list of relationships in the past ten years—is a pity.

Karen Coyle retorted:

But if “A is a performance of Z” means that Z is a work, doesn’t “F is a performance of C” mean that C could also be a work? As some of our music-enabled colleagues replied, by some definitions, an arrangement is a separate work. Could C be simultaneously an expression and a work?

I don’t know the answers, but I think we need to explore this further before we declare that we have four possible boxes (WEMI) and that everything fits neatly into one or the other. That’s why I think it is more important to state that C is an arrangement of Z than to say what box it fits into. It can remain an arrangement of Z and find itself in different boxes based on different contexts or functions.

Rob Styles weighed in:

A picture is worth a thousand words…

… and attached this great diagram showing how the whole shebang can be described in the FRBR model using the RDF syntax (197 KB PDF). (Image belongs to Rob Styles of Talis.) Have a look, it’s boss stuff.

Karen Coyle exclaimed:

Aha!

The Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA posted a set of working documents on Monday: “Please note that these documents are being made available as a means of providing outreach to both library and non-library resource description communities and assisting the Joint Steering Committee in its work.” I take this to be a response to the WoGroFuBiCo recommendation that all work on RDA be suspended immediately: the Joint Steering Committee posted its revised strategic plan (41 KB PDF), which outlines exactly how it plans to keep on working.

A dozen documents are posted, but of particular interest here are the RDA to FRAD mapping (43 KB PDF) and the RDA to FRBR mapping (53 KB PDF). The latter “shows how each RDA element relates to the attributes and relationships defined in FRBR.

(Thanks for Catalogablog for the pointer.)

Comments on the draft report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control were due on Saturday. I didn’t send one in. I was out last Wednesday for a lively discussion at the pub with some very good cataloguers, and we discussed writing up our talk into a submission, but in the end only Tim Knight sent in comments.

There have been lots of comments elsewhere, from people you know like Tim Spalding, Karen Schneider, Jonathan Rochkind, Lorcan Dempsey and Karen Calhoun from OCLC, Roy Tennant, and more. Karen Schneider posted her comments and has been adding links to others she sees. The wogrofubico tag has been catching on, too. Heh.

The brouhaha is dying down. The Working Group will be busy over the holidays, I imagine, reading comments, thinking about them, talking them over, and polishing their draft into the final report. It’s due in January. I’ll post more then about what it says related to FRBR. Until then, the WoGroFuBiConess level will be fairly low here, unless something wild happens.

Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba, of the Kent State School of Library and Information Science, are running a three-year project on FRBR-Based Systems to Effectively Support User Tasks and Facilitate Information Seeking. They asked me to post this to you all:

Dear Colleagues:

During spring and early summer of 2007, we conducted a Delphi study on critical FRBR issues as part of an IMLS-funded project concerning the research and development of FRBR-based retrieval systems. We would like to share the major findings that are available at http://frbr.slis.kent.edu.

We hope the findings may contribute to the ongoing discussion on the recently released report by the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.

Sincerely,

Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba
School of Library and Information Science
Kent State University

I was part of the study and they sent me the report, but it’s not public yet. However, you can read these to see some of what they’ve found:

• Critical Issues and Challenges Facing FRBR Research and Practice (79 KB PDF) from that ASIST Bulletin issue last August
• Major Issues Facing FRBR Research and Practice Identified in a Delphi Study (49 KB PDF)

Work on the project continues, and they’ll be writing up more about the Delphi study. Interesting stuff.

Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools, edited by Arlene Taylor, is now available. If your local bookstore doesn’t have it available, or you don’t see it at a library conference vendor table, you can order it from Amazon.com or your country’s Amazon or some other online bookstore. UPDATE: Or find it in WorldCat and keep an eye on xISBN to see if any new manifestations are published.

It’s a collection of chapters by different authors on different topics. Here’s a list:

• Introduction
• 1: An Introduction to Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) by Arlene G. Taylor
• 2: An Introduction to Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) by Glenn E. Patton
• 3: Understanding the Relationship between FRBR and FRAD by Glenn E. Patton
• 4: FRBR and the History of Cataloging by William Denton
• 5: The Impact of Research on the Development of FRBR by Edward T. O’Neill
• 6: Bibliographic Families and Superworks by Richard P. Smiraglia
• 7: FRBR and RDA (Resource Description and Access) by Barbara B. Tillett
• 8: FRBR and Archival Materials by Alexander C. Thurman
• 9: FRBR and Works of Art, Architecture, and Material Culture by Martha Baca and Sherman Clarke
• 10: FRBR and Cartographic Materials by Mary Lynette Larsgaard
• 11: FRBR and Moving Image Materials by Martha M. Yee
• 12: FRBR and Music by Sherry L. Vellucci
• 13: FRBR and Serials by Steven C. Shadle

That’s me who did chapter four. I haven’t seen the book yet but I’m thrilled that Arlene Taylor included me, and I’m greatly looking forward to reading the other chapters.

The final edits for the book were due in the summer, before all the recent excitement about restructuring RDA and so on. I don’t know if or how that will affect how, for example, Barbara Tillett’s chapter reads today as compared to how it read in June. If you read the book, please leave a comment if you liked it or didn’t.

Karen Coyle’s Interpretations of FRBR Classes compares how FRBR, FRBR expressed in RDF, FRBRoo, and Martha Yee’s new approach organize things into basic concepts. FRBR has ten basic classes, its entities: work, expression, manifestation, item, person, corporate body, concept, object, event, place.

FRBR in RDF has 13 classes, FRBRoo has 23 classes and 18 sub-classes for 41 total, and Martha Yee set out 23 classes.

What’s the upshot? Well, it would take a good sit-down with all involved to hash out the differences, to understand what each group or person was thinking, and to see if we can formulate a theory of how one extends FRBR to meet one’s needs. If a number of people turn out to have the same needs, then it may be that the FRBR model itself needs to take in those ideas. The only way to work this out is to keep modeling and sharing. So I thank the three featured here for the extensive work that they have done in this area.

Michael Gorman (see also his Wikipedia entry) is one of the towering figures in modern cataloguing. I recommend his book Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century, and don’t miss a chance to hear him talk about the subject, either. Of course, if you’ve done any cataloguing then you know his work on Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules.

Every now and then Gorman gets his ginger up and says something lively. His new comments on Resource Description and Access (85 KB PDF) are available online.

Lastly, there is the attachment on the part of the theoreticians to the document Functional requirements for bibliographic records (acronymized to FRBR). FRBR may have some merit as a way of looking at the theory of cataloguing—it has little as a foundational document for creating a cataloguing code. Never mind that the structure of bibliographic records set out in AACR2/ISBD is well established, accepted by scholars and other catalogue users for decades, and with minor flaws in concept and expression that could easily be corrected—it works in practice, but does it work in theory?

Jonathan Rochkind. You’ve been to his blog, or read his comments here or on other blogs, or seen him on mailing lists or in the #code4lib IRC channel. Or perhaps you haven’t. But you should.

There’s been lively discussion about FRBR on mailing lists over the last little while, and Rochkind’s been in it. He posted Why FRBR Entity Model Matters: FRBR Considered as Set Relationships on his blog yesterday, prompted by those list debates. I quote but a few brief snippets of him restating, or re-explaining, the Group 1 entities and their definitions:

I’m going to throw out another way of looking at the FRBR Group 1 entities….

An item is a concrete physical thing in your hand, naturally. That’s straightforward, yes? …

Two items belong to the same manifestation if they are physically identical. Or in the case of digital items that have no physicality, if they are bitwise identical, I guess is the good analog….

Two items belong to the same expression if they are textually identical….

Two items belong to the same work if… well, they belong to the same work.

There’s so much FRBR news these days it’s hard to ration it out to one post a day. Coming up soon: Arlene Taylor’s collection Understanding FRBR is out, and Michael Gorman issued another broadside. But today, IFLA.

FRBR was created by the FRBR Working Group, which was formed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, or IFLA. (Why not IFLAI? Good question.) A couple of years ago, the Working Group became the FRBR Review Group. Its home page, or the FRBR Final Report itself, are what most people link to when they hyperlink “FRBR.”

But now there is a home page just for FRBR itself. It has links to the Final Report, translations (the FRBR term “expressions” being confusing to the average person), a basic reading list on FRBR, and the mailing list. If you need to hyperlink the term “FRBR,” this is a good place to link. Good work by Pat Riva (chair of the Review Group) and IFLA in setting this up.

(Thanks to David Bigwood at Catalogablog for the link.)

Eric Hellman, an OCLC chap, sent ISBN Linking to Wikipedia to web4lib on Monday.

Last week, we quietly announced the addition of a Wikipedia article lookup facility to OCLC’s Worldcat xISBN service. The xISBN service groups ISBNs into works based on the entire Worldcat data set. This means that the service will connect Wikipedia citations to any of the ISBNs associated with the cited work. xISBN is an XML-based “grid service” designed to help libraries plug into the data without worrying too much about the wiring.

For more information on using the Worldcat xISBN service to get Wikipedia articles, see http://xisbn.worldcat.org/xisbnadmin/doc/api.htm

Here’s an example of how to access the service: http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/9789574760442?method=getEditions&format=xml&library=wikipedia&fl=*

The example is a Chinese expression of Alice in Wonderland. xISBN looks up ISBNs of related manifestations — in this case expressions of the book in the original English and in other languages, and Martin Gardner’s annotated version, which is actually a work of its own, a derivative one, but let’s not quibble — and then looks through Wikipedia to find which pages mention any of those ISBNs.

This is pretty neat. All you know about the Wikipedia entry is that it mentions a given ISBN, so there’s some mystery about it. Is it a page about the author, the book, the publisher, something mentioned in the book, or what? The relation is unknown. You can deduce, or infer, or possibly both, some details, however, based on, for example, some of the structured or semi-structured information on the Wikipedia pages.

The Annotated Alice doesn’t have one of Wikipedia’s infoboxes done for WikiProject Novels, but David Lodge’s Small World does. Structured user-contributed metadata! Talk about it!

Now, xISBN doesn’t match the ISBN of my item of this work with any others, so this isn’t the best example, but it’s late and I have to get up early, so it’s hard cheese for you, chum. Imagine it did, and that some of the Wikipedia pages linked therein were to pages with infoboxes and structured metadata, and from them you could infer relationships between all the various FRBR entities involved.

And once this kind of thing gets started, and if LibraryThing’s metadata (see Small World at the ‘Thing) were involved, then there would be more reason for sites to encourage people to add (semi-)structured relations between things, which could then be mined, which would enrich things, which would then feed back and encourage the specifying of more relations.

FRBR is an entity-relationship model. The entities we know well, except for some debate about the details of expressions. The relationships are the really fascinating part. We can grab a lot of them from MARC records, but the more tools to get them other sources, especially sources built by regular people, the better.