The FRBR Blog

I’m not at Code4Lib 2008. I wish I was. Hello to anyone there!

Nicole Engard’s Code4Lib 2008: The Internet Archive and Karen Coombs’s Code4Lib Day 1 Morning Talks both report on the talk that Brewster Kahle (of the Internet Archive) gave.

Engard writes:

The next step according to Brewster is to build the catalog and “we finally need to do this FRBR thing – come on guys, it’s not that hard!!!” Even if the digital copy of the book isn’t available yet, it makes sense to provide pages for the book with catalog data that pulls information from sites like Amazon and other book information sites.

Coombs summarizes this part of his talk: “FRBR is a must!!”

Martha Yee’s chapter from Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools (ISBN 1591585090) is available online for your free reading: FRBR and Moving Image Materials: Content (Work and Expression) versus Carrier (Manifestation).

ABSTRACT: Some of the major problems with Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2R) stem from the failure to clearly analyze the FRBR entities work and expression (content) so as to distinguish them from manifestation (carrier) for nonbook materials such as moving image materials. In this chapter, a clearer and more logical analysis of these concepts is attempted, and, at the end of the chapter, the progress made so far in RDA (Resource Description and Access) development is assessed as well.

I’ll check if I can put my chapter up somewhere too. Congratulations and thanks to Martha Yee for making hers available!

OCLC’s Xiaoming Liu sent word to the xidentifier-l mailing list on 11 February about some new features to xISBN. The xISBN API documentation has been updated to include it. You can now page through results at increments of your choosing. Along with the other metadata available, you can now ask for Library of Congress Control Numbers and cities of publication, and it’ll tell you if it knows. Liu gave this example which asks for only LCCNs and cities. And xISBN now returns full author names, as shown in this other example. Check the API for more — these are just recent additions.

ThingISBN Adds LCCNs, OCLC Numbers from last week explains how thingISBN, LibraryThing’s xISBN equivalent, can now also return LCCNs and OCLC numbers if you ask if, as in this example.

The Library of Congress Control Number is the unique identifying number assigned to new things acquired by the Library of Congress. It was in the news lately because of the new LCCN permalink service, a very nice way of getting reliable access to the LC’s bibliographic metadata.

The OCLC number is an equivalent number assigned by OCLC for things in WorldCat. About a year ago the numbers, which go up by one each time something new is added, hit 100,000,000.

With these new services it’s easier to acquire useful metadata in a nice easy-to-use format. You can take an ISBN, find out more ISBNs, ask LC for what it knows about them, and so on. All three services will be useful for FRBRization projects. You may wonder why there are so many unique identifying numbers for books, but that’s just the way big databases work, and LC and OCLC are so enormous and copied that other people care about the control numbers they assign.

CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Tutorial, from a workshop at the University of Glasgow on 29 January.

In part two, the tutorial presented the draft ooFRBR Model. This model describes in detail the intellectual creation process from the first conception to the publishing in industrial form such as books or electronically. This proved equally interesting for the digital libraries community, and it is a fine example of the extensibility of the CRM for dedicated domains. There was enough time for questions and discussion at the end.

Dan Scott and Mike Rylander, who work on Evergreen, the open source integrated library system, pointed me at some discussion about oISBN: “I thought I’d go ahead and plug our xISBN-like service, called oISBN, that exposes the metarecords that our MARC fingerprinting algorithm creates.”

The link in the old blog post doesn’t work because it was on a test server, but this link for 0767886739 works and gives back some XML.

Nothing’s been done on this since, but if you want to help, you know where to download the source code and start hacking …

There’s an interesting thread on the ngc4lib mailing list, started by Tim (“Mr. LibraryThing”) Spalding’s Browsing percentages / analytics. The archive gets confused because some mailers break threading, but Dave Pattern follows up and says that by his measurements, in his library’s catalogue, 0.2% of people click on xISBN/thingISBN-generated related edition links. Jonathan Rochkind asks why Pattern dropped xISBN and went with thingISBN but, as I write this, Pattern is probably asleep and hasn’t replied yet. Jim Weinheimer mentioned the four user tasks.

FRBR_OO draft 0.9 (1.1 MB PDF), or, more formally, FRBR: Object-Oriented Definition and Mapping to FRBR_ER (version 0.9 draft), came out last month but I just found out about it.

This document is the draft definition of FRBR (object-oriented version, harmonised with CIDOC CRM), hereafter referred to as FRBR_OO, a formal ontology intended to capture and represent the underlying semantics of bibliographic information and to facilitate the integration, mediation, and interchange of bibliographic and museum information. Such a common view is necessary to provide interoperable information systems for those users interested in accessing common or related content. Beyond that, it results in a formalisation which is more suited for the implementation of FRBR concepts with object-oriented tools, and which facilitates the testing and adoption of FRBR concepts in implementations with different functional specifications and different environments. It applies empirical analysis and ontological structure to the entities and processes associated with works, to their properties, and to the relationships among them. Thereby it reveals a web of interrelationships, which is also applicable to information objects in non-bibliographic arenas2, and is useful to justify the need of information elements in different environments.

(Thanks to Tim Knight for the pointer.)

Some nice things I’ve missed:

• Jenn Riley, Musings On RDA, LC Working Group Report, and Various Other Random Things: “For example, the OCLC response touts its FRBR work as testing the WG didn’t realize was happening, but it glosses over the fact that the Work-level clustering and other FRBR-like things OCLC has been doing aren’t true FRBR implementations.”
• Christine Schwartz, ALA Midwinter: Library of Congress Working Group Report: “Having just been released a few days before, the LC working group’s report, On the Record, was a hot topic at the conference. Rather that walk through this session point by point. I’ll try to pull out some of the highlights of this highly anticipated forum.”
• Thom Hickey, What People Skip: “Jenny and I have been looking at differences in the WorldCat.org FRBR clustering and the clustering we do here in Research. Ideally we’d like them to be the same, but we keep fussing with ours in Research, so we knew there would be differences.”
• Mike Simpson, Facets, FRBR, And Bibliographic Data Modeling: “Also for this discussion, ‘FRBR’ means something like, ‘note the fact that the English translation of this Shakespeare compendium, and the German edition, are really just two variant representations of the same thing.’”
• Jessi M. Librarian, FRBR! Finally!: “Library vendors have struggled with the concept for a long time, and haven’t found a good way to implement the logic to make this happen. The wait is over for libraries! Library Thing for Libraries offers an catalog add-on option that will do exactly what Amazon has been doing for a very long time.”
• A comment to the above: “Please check out how we do FRBR in AquaBrowser at Carroll County. Search for Scarlet Letter in their catalog and see how the results are already rolled up to show 1 record for 8 versions editions.”
• Peter Zimmerman, FRBR and Music Recordings: “And although Bryant’s book [Music Librarianship: A Practical Guide ] is getting a little old (the second edition I’m reading was 1985; the first, 1959), I find myself anticipating FRBR.”
• Karen Schneider, They Tried to Make Me Go to FRBR, I Said No, No, No: “We do NOT need to stop RDA; we need to implement FRBR and get it right, not ‘test; it more; and we do NOT need to do years more of ‘user testing’ to teach us what we already know.”
• Dan Chudnov, WoGroFuBiCo Doesn’t Go Far Enough: “… until such time as we have been able to catch up on all of our other obligations and professional responsibilities and newly devote the full and complete community attention each of these critical developments vital to the future of our entire profession deserves. And testing, lots of testing, too, we can’t forget that (see 4.2.1 below).”

Last week Talisman Rob Styles posted MARC, RDF and FRBR, two initialisms and an acronym that probably get your heart racing like they do mine. In it, he points to a paper he wrote with fellow Talismen Danny Ayers and Nadeem Shabir: Semantic MARC, MARC 21 and the Semantic Web (440 KB PDF),

Abstract: The MARC standard for exchanging bibliographic data has been in use for several decades and is used by major libraries worldwide. This paper discusses the possibilities of representing the most prevalent form of MARC, MARC21, as RDF for the Semantic Web, and aims to understand the tradeoffs, if any, resulting from transforming the data. Critically our approach goes beyond a simple transliteration of the MARC21 record syntax to develop rich semantic descriptions of the varied things which may be described using bibliographic records. We present an algorithmic approach for consistently generating URIs from textual data, discuss the algorithmic matching of author names and suggest how RDF generated from MARC records may be linked to other data sources on the Web.

Thom Hickey, of OCLC renown, left a comment.

I gave a talk yesterday at the 2008 Ontario Library Association Conference called FRBR: Who’s Using It and What Can I Expect Next?. It’s a general overview: a bit about what FRBR is, a bit about what’s going on with RDA and the WoGroFuBiCo, some examples (xISBN, thingISBN, AustLit), a few things to keep an eye on, and a few things I think will happen over the next year or two. I recorded it on my little MP3 player and there is a low quality MP3 recording (1 hour, 14 MB) available to go with it. (I have the original WAV file if any audio expert would care to clean it up.)

I encourage any of you who speak about FRBR to record your talks. Post them on the web and I’ll link to them! Or, if you don’t want to or can’t do the audio but can put up your slides, include the speaking notes too.