The FRBR Blog

From the Library of Congress’s Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, or WoGroFuBiCo as the world knows it now, comes the final version of the report the draft of which we all read in December: On the Record (441 KB PDF).

Janet Swan Hill, one of the WoGroFuBiCo leaders, sent this to AUTOCAT:

The LC Working Group is on the brink of submitting its final report to LC. Please note that the final tally was more than 100 single-spaced pages of comments from the public about the draft. We all read every comment, and every single one was considered.

Both arising from comments, and arising from the continuation of work we had already contemplated, the final report will contain some substantive changes from the draft, including some additional recommendations, and some modified recommendations.

The report may be available prior to your leaving for ALA. If so, I urge you to read it, and as you discuss it with your colleagues, be sure that you are both referring to the final report rather than to the draft.

Many comments had to do with people wishing or believing that the report was something that it is not. For example, the report is not an implementation plan, and so it did not contain recommendations regarding “how”, “when”, “in what order”, and “with what money.” Implementation comes AFTER the recommendation itself is accepted, and must be dealt with then. A newly-added executive summary contains some clarification about the scope and limitations of the report.

Similarly, some comments were received about matters that are outside the WG charge (for example the status of LC as not a national library). In these cases, the WG did a “reality check”, to determine whether indeed the matters did not belong in this report.

Many comments were received that had the WG saying “didn’t we say that?” or “we didn’t say that, did we?” and comments such as these had us re-examining our wording to make sure that it adequately conveyed what we intended.

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to read the draft and comment.

I haven’t yet checked if the FRBR-related recommendations changed.

Did you know that the Standing Committee of the IFLA Cataloguing Section has a newsletter called SCATNews? I didn’t. But thanks to Catalogablog I found the December 2007 issue of SCATNews (139 KB PDF), and there’s some FRBR (and FRAD and FRSAR) stuff in it, along with other international standards.

Page two says that the revisions to the definition of the Expression entity were accepted and will be published. The working group on aggregates is going to be at it for an extra two years because aggregates (things combined with, or containing, other things — think of all of the works in any issue of a newspaper or magazine, with all of those articles, photographs, cartoons, advertisements, etc.) are so confusing.

Page five has “What’s New with the FRBR Entity ‘Expresion’?” by Pat Riva and Anders Cato. I quote a bit of it:

Except for exact photographic reproductions, the only way to be absolutely positive that there are no tiny differences in the words contained in two different manifestations of the same textual work is to compare the two manifestations word-by-word. This is obviously something that is not going to happen in any normal cataloguing situation, with the unfortunate result that under a strict interpretation of the definition, the entity expression could never actually be applied, thus completely loosing [sic] its potential for organizing the displays of those works with many manifestations.

The revised version (a new expression!) isn’t on the web site yet, but it will replace the old version when it’s published.

Finally, on page seven Pat Riva (chair of the FRBR Review Group) reports that Ed O’Neill and Carol van Nuys left the Review Group when their terms ended, and Françoise Leresche (of the Bibliothèque nationale de France) and Eeva Murtomaa (who back in 2002 cowrote Data Mining MARC to Find: FRBR?) joined. Marg Stewart is the new liaison with the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA.

Hello. Happy new year. I hope 2008 is a good one for you. Who knows what will happen with FRBR over the next twelve months? We know there will be reports written, conference presentations given, blog entries posted, implementations written or improved, user tests made, heated words exchanged, and I think the amount of attention paid to FRBR will increase, as it did in 2007 over 2006. I’ll keep on pointing out what I see. As always, if you’re doing anything FRBR-related and want to get the word out, let me know. It will be an interesting year in bibliographic control. Don’t bet against anyone who says things won’t get freakier.

Last November you may have seen mention on some blogs of Francis Miksa’s guest lecture at the library school at Shampoo-Banana. It was given on 6 March 2006 and was called The Genius of Library Cataloging and its Possible Future (RealAudio).

I converted it into an MP3 (using the same Unix commands as when I did the same for the WoGroFuBiCo release) but didn’t get around to listening to it until last week. I highly recommend it, especially in light of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control report, which will be made final in a week or two. Francis Miksa is a major figure in the field, and I highly recommend his book Charles Ammi Cutter: Library Systematizer. Miksa talks about Cutter in his lecture, and much else, giving a personal survey of the history of cataloguing and its future.

As Christine Schwartz pointed out, “last 40 minutes or so deal with Dr. Miksa’s vision for a cataloging future,” so don’t tune out early. Really, this is worth a listen.

UPDATE: I forgot to point out that Miksa mentions FRBR several times in his talk. He stresses the importance of relationships between things, and how useful they are to users. At one point he questions whether FRBR is good enough at this, or if it’s dealt with enough in the Final Report. The relationships between the entities are of great interest to lots of people working on or thinking about FRBR, so he should have no worries there. Work, expression, manifestation, item are the four most commonly used words when talking about FRBR, but how a work and an expression are related, or how two manifestations relate, or how a person is the subject of a work and how the person is related to a group — such things are all very important and are what will make FRBR so useful, I think. Personally, I’m in favour of letting users decide what relationships they want, and in giving them tools to do so.

Also, I think I got mixed up with too many negatives when I said you shouldn’t bet against anyone who thinks bibliographic control won’t get freakier. I can’t even parse that. Let me simplify: bibliographic control will get freakier in 2008. Everything will.