The FRBR Blog

Cataloger Scenarios from the DCMI/RDA Task Group (which Karen Coyle mentioned last week, because she’s part of it) is good reading.

These scenarios are intended to assist catalogers in visualizing how their work might flow in a setting that used RDA Vocabularies and FRBR relationships. The goal here is just to show how these packages of information might fit together and how catalogers can use their knowledge and experience in different contexts.

The fourth one, where a film cataloguer faces two DVDs with different versions of John Ford’s The Iron Horse, is a riot.

She also has to link to the Ford at Fox set somehow for the series. Jane thinks this is manifestation information, and is unsure how the linkage will work between individually cataloged manifestations and the set, which presumably has work, expression, and manifestation records.

Jane has now spent two days cataloging this resource. Her boss calls her into her office to explain why she should spend so much time and money playing with her records when they could just outsource it to India. Jane goes back to her desk and looks at the next time in her pile, which is a videodisc containing 30 short films by filmmaker Dennis Oppenheim. The one under that is a disc 60 short animated films by a variety of people she’s never heard of. Next is the second volume with another 60 films. She contemplates the idea of work records for these, then goes home and slits her wrists.

The Open Library developers’ meeting on 29 February was recorded, and the videos are now up on their web site.

After reading her online for I don’t know how long, I finally got to meet Karen Coyle last week. Would you like to do the Four FRBR Questions? I asked. Sure, she said. Would you mind doing them live on video, with no preparation, so I can try the first FRBR Blog videocast? Sure, she said. We were just getting ready when the break was over and we had to get back to the meeting, so there’s no video. I caught up with her by e-mail instead.

If you don’t follow Coyle’s InFormation, her blog, you should. Over on her web site, you can find lots of her writings (back to 1994), such as her column in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, and links to other papers like last year’s Resource Description and Access: Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century, which she co-wrote with Diane Hillmann (who did the four questions herself last May). (The thing about the subtitle of the article, in case you missed it, is that we’re in the 21st century now.) And if you look in the bottom right-hand corner of the credits on the report from the WoGroFuBiCo you’ll see her listed as a consultant. She spoke at Code4Lib 2008 and a recording of the talk should show on up the conference site soon.

When did you first hear about FRBR?

I assume it was posted to the MARC list when issued, but I don’t remember when I first decided to download it and read it. I do remember that it was a big topic at MARBI (the MARC standards group) and that at the time there were people who pronounced it “Furby.” Interestingly, I do not believe that it has ever been the object of a MARC standards request.

What’s your involvement with it now?

I am currently working on a project to model the RDA data elements in RDF. One important goal of that project is to have a clear definition of each data element used by the library cataloging community. Because RDA is modeled on FRBR and FRAD, we need to understand how the elements relate to FRBR entities and how that affects the elements and their definitions. (Note that I’m using “data elements” here as a shorthand, but RDF actually works with “properties,” which have special meaning in that standard.)

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

We need to think beyond cataloging with FRBR to what implementation of FRBR could mean in terms of services to our users. The use of FRBR has the potential to allow us to move library data into the nascent semantic web. We could even be visible pioneers in that area, given the huge amount of carefully crafted data that we have in our databases. The semantic web functionality promises a much richer information environment than our library catalogs provide today, and one in which library data can interact seamlessly with the entire Web.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

FRBR describes bibliographic data — like authors, titles, and subjects — as a web of things with relationships between those things.

Previously in the series:

• August 2005: Patrick Le Boeuf
• August 2005: Pat Riva
• January 2006: Barbara Tillett
• Feburary 2007: Martha Yee
• May 2007: Diane Hillmann
• January 2008: Shawne Miksa
• January 2008: Arlene Taylor

(Picture of Karen Coyle talking at Code4Lib 2008 taken from Rob Styles’s Flickr photoset by Creative Commons rules.)

Last Friday I attended a meeting the Open Library hosted in San Francisco. It was a solid geekfest, and one of the most inspiring days of my career as a librarian. My thanks to Brewster Kahle (director of the Internet Archive, where the Open Library is hosted), Aaron Swartz (Open Library project leader; here’s him talking about it last November), Alexis Rossi (Internet Archive project leader) and everyone else for organizing the day and inviting me.

It was a meeting for developers and library geeks, to introduce them to the Open Library and its framework and API (details here), to discuss what should happen next, and generally to get a bunch of people into one room, get them excited about the project, and to encourage them to work on it. It worked.

I’d met some of the people before (Sian Meikle, Bess Sadler, Rob Styles, Casey Bisson, Jeremy Frumkin), and got to meet some others for the first time (Ed Summers, Karen Coyle, Emily Lynema, Eric Morgan, Matt Cordial, David Strauss), and merely saw some from across the room (Roy Tennant, Terry Reese). There were about thirty people there; I’m sorry I can’t list them all.

The day began at 8:30 with us all arriving at a building in the Presidio and getting some breakfast. Brewster Kahle introduced the project, then Aaron Swartz spoke and went into some technical details, as did an OL programmer. There were some lightning talks by people there — quick talks about things they were working on that were related to or might be useful in the Open Library. People suggested topics for further discussion, and after lunch we broke up into three (four?) groups.

The one I sat in on was about merging and identifiers. I didn’t write down any notes, but other people did (and the entire event was filmed), which I hope turn up online. A few points:

• It’s generally agreed that the Open Library needs to be FRBRized. (Certainly Brewster Kahle thinks so.) But how? We need to get down to business and do it.
• Use existing algorithms: the Library of Congress’s FRBR display tool, OCLC’s, Karen Coyle’s MELVYL merge algorithm.
• Use whatever data LibraryThing might provide. In particular, could we use the work groupings that LibraryThing users have made to train an algorithm to do work matchings? If we know that LibraryThing says books A, B, C, and D are all the same work, look at what they have in common and assign weightings based on that, not on predetermined weights like “a match on ISBN counts for N” and “a 90% match on title counts for M.”
• Rob Styles had a way of generating “organic” identifiers, based on facts known about a work or expression or manifestation, instead of using index numbers from database tables. For example, “hamletshakespeare” (or an MD5 checksum thereof) might identify Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a work. There was some debate about whether how useful this would be.
• If algorithms are used for FRBRization and other work, but every page on the Open Library is a editable by all users, then how would we manage the mix of people and machine changes? How to stop the machines from overwriting corrections by people?
• What (possible Ajaxy) tools could be used to help people group manifestations into expressions and works? Nothing exists now, but it can be built.
• Either Rob Styles or Karen Coyle said that ISBNs don’t represent manifestations, they represent everything that has that ISBN on it. Sometimes that is a manifestation. Sometimes it’s not. ISBNs as a means of identifying manifestations are unreliable.
• So how can we make manifestation-, expression-, and work-level identifiers, and share them around the world? Should the Open Library be the sole authoritative source for such numbers? Everyone has there own identifying numbers for things. Can the Open Library act as a translation tool to turn one ID number into others?
• What about OCLC’s planned GLIMIR, Global Library Manifestation Identifier? Roy Tennant mentioned them but OCLC isn’t making anything public about it yet. I’ll post as soon I hear more.

Other things were discussed, but that’s about all I remember. I hope Karen and others in the group post about it.

Around 4 the groups came back together and reported on what they’d talked about, what next steps could be taken, etc. Then we went outside for a group picture and visited the Internet Archive’s office, across the street. Then it was off for some wine and cheese and relaxed chit-chat. A fine day.

I have some ideas for FRBRy things to hack on. I’ll post about whatever I do. I encourage you to look at the Open Library and get involved somehow.

There is now a companion web site for Arlene Taylor’s Understanding FRBR. Barbara Tillett’s chapter in the book was about RDA (Resource Description and Access), which changed a lot between when she handed in her chapter and when the book came out, and she has some updates on the web site.