Work, expression, manifestation, item … blog.
A weblog following developments around the world in FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.
Maintained by William Denton, Web Librarian at York University. Suggestions and comments welcome at wtd@pobox.com.
Confused? Try What Is FRBR? (2.8 MB PDF) by Barbara Tillett, or Jenn Riley's introduction. For more, see the basic reading list.
Books: FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert Maxwell (ISBN 9780838909508) and Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools edited by Arlene Taylor (ISBN 9781591585091) (read my chapter FRBR and the History of Cataloging).
Lorcan Dempsey’s FRBR and Learning Objects (FLOR?) points to Pete Johnston’s Learning Materials and FRBR which points to Phil Barker’s LMAP Update which links to the Learning Materials Application Profile draft which says the “proposed object model borrows from the scholarly works application profile (SWAP) application model, which in turn is based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) entity model.”
I’m using the Firefox extensions LIbX and OpenURL Referrer now, and they’re great. I’m going to try adding COinS data when I mention a book or article. LibX will turn the ISBNs into live links to a library search. It uses xISBN! OpenURL Referrer will give you some kind of extra button that will do a library search.
What that looks like to me:
Three days ago, Shawne Miksa answered the Four FRBR Questions, and today I’m delighted that Arlene Taylor, editor of Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools, joins the pantheon.
Arlene Taylor is professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh. Before moving to the library school there she taught at U Chicago and Columbia; the lengthy CV on her web site lists all her previous work, starting as a librarian in a junior high school. A more personal introduction to her career is in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly (32: 3): A Tribute to Arlene Taylor (2001) . I used her books The Organization of Information and [Wynar's] Introduction to Cataloging and Classification to get through my cataloguing courses in library school.
When did you first hear about FRBR?
I have been friends with Barbara Tillett for many years. I first heard about FRBR from her while she was working as a consultant to the study group.
What’s your involvement with it now?
I try to keep up with what is going on. I have been asked to speak about FRBR to various groups (e.g., the Missouri Library Association), and to LIS graduate school cataloging classes. I attended the FRBR workshop at OCLC 2005. I attended the meeting of the FRBR Implementers group at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia (January 2008). I edited a book on FRBR that was published by Libraries Unlimited in November 2007, which includes my chapter attempting to explain FRBR in understandable terms.
What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?
I think that there is a huge need for all librarians and other organizers of information to become educated about FRBR and about how much it could help users better find much of what they are looking for. Getting the FRBR model implemented into library systems, and better yet, implemented on the Web, is going to be dependent upon the persistence of those of us who understand the importance of organizing information. We have to convince system designers of the superior value of this model in showing relationships among entities being sought by users.
What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?
FRBR is a way of explaining the relationships between and among works, authors, and concepts in the bibliographic universe. And the bibliographic universe, if you were wondering, encompasses all instances of recorded information. (A student once wrote on an exam that the bibliographic universe is where Professor Taylor lives.)
Previously in the series:
Over at her blog Cataloging Futures (which I think of as Cataloguing Futures), Christine Schwartz posted Resource Description and Access (RDA) Update Forum last week, covering an ALA conference session about what’s going on with Resource Description and Access (the new FRBR- and FRAD-based cataloguing rules now being written). This’ll give you the bird’s eye lowdown on all that. If you think it’s confusing following what’s going on with how RDA is developing, imagine being one of the people writing it!
It’s an exciting week here: two people have answered the Four FRBR Questions. First up is Shawne Miksa, who teaches at the University of North Texas’s School of Library and Information Sciences. She’s the chair of the ALA‘s RDA Implementation Task Force, so she’s got FRBR on her mind, since Resource Description and Access is grounded in FRBR. She’s self-archived some of her publications and you can read Understanding Support of FRBR’s Four User Tasks In MARC-Encoded Bibliographic Records, which was in the ASIST Bulletin 33: 6 (Aug/Sep 2007).
When did you first hear about FRBR?
Probably 2002. The title alone tingled up and down my spine.
What’s your involvement with it now?
Nothing direct, but I am the chair of the RDA Implementation Task Force.
What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?
Patience.
What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?
Multi-dimensional answer gardens.
Shawne Miksa is the daughter of Francis Miksa, who did that that great talk I linked to a a couple of weeks ago.
Martha Yee and Ed Jones gave a talk at the ALA Midwinter conference a week ago, on 14 January. The ALA’s Metadata blog blogged the talk with some copious notes and Yee put up PowerPoint slides on her site: Martha Yee’s slides (182 KB PPT) and Ed Jones’s slides (118 KB PPT).
As you’d expect from these two, very interesting stuff. I wish the talk had been recorded. I’d love to hear it.
Scribe, a pseudonymous librarian who blogs at Quiescit Anima Libris, posted Francis Miksa t’other day and linked to my post a week ago where I said you should listen to a great talk by Miksa.
Browsing around, I saw The Problem with Blogs by Catalogers/Techies, from April 2007, and felt my ears burning:
I really like reading blogs by other catalogers and by technology people. They can be informative, and insightful, and give me links to more good things and more NEW things.
However, they also tend to use tech terms and cataloging terms to the extreme. This is related to the problem I have with FRBR (the “new” cataloging standard). If I am not an experienced cataloger, or a tech guru, some, nay, MANY of these blogs are completely unintelligible to me. Thus, they are useless! I think that one reason Lawrence Lessig has enjoyed such ridiculous success with his articles, and blogs, and books, is that he is accessible to almost everyone. He doesn’t dive into minutiae; he keeps it general and smart and, most importantly, relevant to a broad audience. Jim over in your cataloging department who has “the coolest blog about cataloging!”, cites people you’ve never heard of, terms you’ve never used, and programs you would never want.Now, I’m a fairly experienced cataloger and organizer. I know what they’re getting at, most of the time. But sometimes I feel like a kindergartener, and I don’t think that is my fault.
I’m going to use the example of FRBR again. I use AACRII, and am comfortable with the terminology of AACRII. I’m even somewhat experienced in FRBR terminology, since my cataloging professor has been part of the movement to change our terminology to encompass all kinds of materials (books, web sites, journals, antelopes, etc).
But when I go to almost any website that talks about FRBR, I’m lost almost immediately. Who is that person they’re touting? What article? What the hell do you mean by manifestation? How do I apply that very abstract term to my own concrete stack of books and cds and multi-volume treatises that are sitting on my desk? Does anyone know? Does anyone really care?
It’s a fair cop, guv. Often I just post pointers to obscure blog posts or articles in scholarly journals that many readers can’t get to. In my defense, right at the top of each page it says this is a “weblog following developments around the world in FRBR.” It’s mostly informational, so that there’s one easy place where people can track what’s going on with FRBR. If something new is available, I want to point to it, whether it’s introductory or advanced, widely applicable or obscure.
A book might be the answer: Robert Maxwell’s A Guide for the Perpexed or Arlene Taylor’s Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools. Or the “Confused?” links in the top left for online introductions. Should I have more basic intro-to-FRBR links?
Is there anything in particular you blog readers would like to see covered here this year? Special features on something? Let me know. I could try to get in some expert guest bloggers, for example.
If you’re at the Ontario Library Association’s 2008 Superconference (not just a conference — a super conference!) then you’re welcome to come to my talk (session number 1306) on Friday 1 February at 3:45 pm: “FRBR: Who’s Using It and What Can I Expect Next?”
I’ll be showing a lot of stuff live on the web and I’ll post my links or presentation or whatever I come up with. I’ll see about recording the talk, too.
If you were going to such a talk, is there anything in particular you’d like to learn about or have explained? I have a rough plan of what I’ll cover but suggestions are welcome.
There are about thirty other sessions going on at the same time, including Casey Bisson on “OPAC 2.0: What Works Already?” and Bess Sadler talking about Library-in-a-Box. On top of that, Mita Williams and my colleague the renowned Stacy Allison-Cassin (who occasionally blogs at Between 4’33″ and 4 3/4 in.) will be talking about their white paper Scholr 2.0.
I don’t blame you if you prefer one of those to my talk, but feel free to say hello if you see me around the conference.
Tim Spalding, of LibraryThing renown, posted While You Were Sleeping, thingISBN Is Getting Better. thingISBN is LibraryThing’s equivalent to OCLC’s xISBN: give either one an ISBN and it will give you back a bunch of ISBNs that are other manifestations of the same work. thingISBN’s coverage and comprehensiveness is improving, as Spalding shows. It’s all done by LibraryThing users clumping things together, and it’s free.
I told you that Arlene Taylor’s collection Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools was out. Robert Maxwell, who works at the Brigham Young University library, has a book out too: FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed. I mentioned it before when it was announced, but now it’s out and you can order a copy.
I haven’t seen it yet, but if you have, feel free to leave a comment or review. Two FRBR books in two months!