The FRBR Blog

This isn’t directly about FRBR but I know you won’t mind.

Announcing the One Big Library Unconference

http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

E-mail: onebig@yorku.ca

When: Friday 27 June 2008, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Where: The Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

“It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special libraries, private libraries. But really there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world.”

The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians, technologists, and other interested people, talking about the present and future of libraries.

It’s organized and sponsored by York University Libraries and members of the YUL Emerging Technologies Interest Group: Stacy Allison-Cassin, William Denton, and John Dupuis.

In an interconnected world, all physical and virtual libraries can really be thought of as branches of One Big Library. We would like toget together and explore that concept. Areas of interest:

• The future of libraries
• Collaboration on building One Big Library collections and services
• Uses of social software in libraries
• Tools to support and extend the One Big Library

Our goals are:

• Bringing people interested in the future of libraries together with the hope of sparking collaboration and cooperation
• Starting conversations between people in different kinds of libraries, and people inside and outside libraries
• Intellectual stimulation and fun!

Find out more, sign up, and suggest a topic for a talk, on the wiki: http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

I don’t think Martha Yee (who did the Four Questions last year) will mind if I quote the entirety of her Wednesday e-mail to the FRBR mailing list:

In honor of Jimmy Durante (smile–see quote in signature below), all of my “What is a Work?” articles published in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly in 1994-1995 are now available at the UC eScholarship repository, as follows:

“What is a Work? Part 1, The User and the Objects of the Catalog.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1994; 19:1:9-28. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2709

“What is a Work? Part 2, The Anglo-American Cataloging Codes.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1994; 19:2:5-22. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2710

“What is a Work? Part 3, The Anglo-American Cataloging Codes, Continued.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1995; 20:1:25-45. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2755

“What is a Work? Part 4, Cataloging Theorists and a Definition.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1995; 20:2:3-23. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2711

Another relevant article that I wrote about FRBR-izing OCLC is available as well:

“Musical Works on OCLC, or, What if OCLC Were Actually to Become a Catalog?” Music Reference Services Quarterly 2002: 8:1:1-26. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2713

In addition, my recent article analyzing the differences among cataloging, metadata, descriptive bibliography, and abstracting and indexing services is now available:

“Cataloging Compared to Descriptive Bibliography, Abstracting and Indexing Services, and Metadata.” Invited for Ruth Carter festschrift, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 2007; 44:3/4:307-328. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2721

The Durante quote: “You have a dollar. I have a dollar. We swap. Now you have my dollar and I have your dollar. We are not better off. You have an idea. I have an idea. We swap. Now you have two ideas and I have two ideas. Both are richer. When you gave, you have. What I got, you did not lose. That’s cooperation.” (Yee cites Schnozzola by Gene Fowler, 1951.)

Preach it, Martha.

The CONSER Operations Meeting is on at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and on the agenda is Adolfo Tarango (of U California at San Diego) presenting a paper: FRBR for Serials: Rounding the Square to Fit the Peg (228 KB PDF). (CONSER is a cooperative online serials cataloguing program, among other things. Cataloguing serials (journals, magazines, newspapers, blogs) is non-trivial.)

Various presentations given and papers published over the past few years have addressed the issue of applying FRBR to serials. Each has started with the premise that FRBRizing serials cataloging is a good idea, but for the most part, all attempts have ended with the conclusion that serials don’t quite fit into the FRBR model. Creating separate usable work, expression, and manifestation level records is not possible. This proposal turns the cart around. Instead of attempting to make serials fit the FRBR model we make FRBR fit the serials publishing reality. As such, this proposal begins with a redefinition of the FRBR concept of work, and for purposes of cataloging, introduces the idea of a “work segment” record. The FRBR definitions of expression, manifestation, and item do not change. The end result is two practical applications: a potential serial authority structure and a possible serial bibliographic cataloging framework. Application of each resolves a variety of existing and emerging bibliographic control problems. These include creating a more holistic presentation of the historical run of a serial through its various title incarnations, limiting the proliferation of and need for uniform titles as distinguishing elements, reducing cataloging workloads, and improving bibliographic displays and navigation. The information that follows is in three parts. The first part gives the new definition of the serial work; the second presents the proposed serial authority structure, and the third covers the proposed serials cataloging concept of the work segment record.

… Taking inspiration from Martha Yee’s recent ALA midwinter presentation and a recently published paper by Everett Allgood, this proposed serials cataloging framework doesn’t attempt to create either an expression or manifestation level record, but rather blends both into a “work segment” record. A significant reason for doing so is a resulting labor savings, but also, it pushes the questions “Given the data recorded and user needs, do we need separate expression and manifestation level records, is having expression and manifestation level data in a single record such a bad thing, especially if there are labor savings and user service advantages to be gained by combining them in one record?”

Thanks to Tim Knight and The Serials Cataloger (who deems it “essential reading”) for the link.

(Updated 29 April so that the quote reads, “The FRBR definitions of expression, manifestation, and item do not change.”)

I’m delighted to say that Libraries Unlimited granted me permission to post my chapter from Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools, edited by Arlene Taylor (ISBN 9781591585091).

I put it in the institutional repository where I work, York University: FRBR and the History of Cataloging (211 KB PDF).

It’ll be up for five years, then I have to reapply for permission to make it available for another five.

Martha Yee’s chapter FRBR and Moving Image Materials: Content (Work and Expression) versus Carrier (Manifestation) is also available in her university’s repository. I hope other writers in the book can put their chapters up, too.

Xiaoming Liu posted xISBN JSON Callback and a GoogleBooks Demo last week.

JSON output is native JavaScript, and callbacks are particularly useful for use with web service requests in client-side JavaScript. see: http://xisbn.worldcat.org/xisbnadmin/doc/api.htm#callback.

I don’t see the Google Books magic in the Google Books demo that he mentions, but that’s probably some temporary thing or something on Google’s end. I noticed that happen when I did some Google Books availability testing of my own. Give it a try and see if it works.

You can also get the xISBN output in tab-delimited format, perfect for shell hacking. Liu gives an example which I tweak slightly:

$ GET "http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/0596002815?method=getEditions&fl=*&format=txt" | cut -f 2,5
177669176 54619668 55847258 79871142	Learning Python
44960325	Learning Python
41466161	Learning Python
156890981 182576260 190774334 213482782	Learning Python.
44124125	Introduction à Python
173084464	Learning python.
69532105	Python

(GET is from Perl’s libwww-perl module, and I always use it and fetch in preference to curl.)

Andrew Hankinson, a music PhD student at McGill in Montreal, Canada, posted My FRBR Dilemma t’other day.

I’ve been a big FRBR fan for a long time. In my cataloguing classes, I was adamant that AACR2 was the “old ‘n busted” while FRBR was “the new hotness.” If only, I posited, our data was in FRBR format. A library’s catalogue would become a berrypicker’s utopia, full of paths to be followed, relationships to be discovered and insight to be gained.

Lately, though, I’ve been having serious doubts.

His three objections — read the post for the explanations — are:

1. Every item has its own “FRBR.”
2. It’s unnatural.
3. It has relationships, but not the right kind.

Last year I pointed out a paper by João Alberto de Oliveira Lima. Now his PhD thesis, Modelo Genérico de Relacionamentos na Organização da Informação Legislativa e Jurídica, is available online. It’s in Portuguese, but here’s the English abstract:

In most of the time information does not work in an isolate form and it always belongs to one context, making relationships with other entities. Legislative and legal information, in a certain way, is characterized by their high degree of relationships. Laws, bills, legal cases and doctrine are connected by several forms, creating a rich network of information. Efforts done for the organization of information generate artificial models that try to represent the real world, creating systems and schemes of concepts used in the classification processes and indexing of information resources. This research had the main objective of proposing a Generic Model of Relationship (GMR), based in a simple constructs which permitted the establishment of relationships between concepts and information units. In the conception of GMR were used Ingetraut Dahlberg’s Theory of Concept and the models CIDOC CRM (ISO 21.117:2006), FRBROO and Topic Maps (ISO 13.250:1999). The identification of relationship and the characteristics of information units in a legal domain were collected in the project “Coletânea Brasileira de Normas e Julgados de Telecomunicações”, using the methodology of Action Research. Besides the development of GMR and its application in the legislative and legal information domains, the research also contributed with the definitions of one identification system of documents versions and a new meaning for the term “information unit”.

• Three from Scribe. First, RDA, FRBR, and Other Acronyms, about Karen Coyle’s Code4Lib talk. “I am SO GLAD that Karen Coyle gave her talk at Code4Lib on RDA.”
• Second, Creating Meaning. “RDA and FRBR have a great ideal in place, and I love it, but I think that RDA is missing something really central in their thought processes. Even if you use machines to pull a lot of this data, and we use publisher information, and we stop caring about grammar and punctuation, it is still a ridiculously high expectation to put on catalogers to ‘create meaning’ for the entire scope of human knowledge.”
• And finally Define Yourself, Sir: “FRBR tried to help us out by changing some of the ways that we think about conceptual objects in the library world, but I don’t think that most librarians are well-versed in that FRBR world, and don’t use those terms on a regular basis. And since RDA apparently isn’t even using all of FRBR’s concepts to write their manual…well, I don’t exactly see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
• FRBR-Like Grouping and Metasearch in Koha. A bit cryptic.
• Facets, FRBR, And Bibliographic Data Modeling, a blog post by Mike Simpson on 14 December 2007. “So here’s what wound up on my chalkboard during a discussion with a couple of colleagues, about what kinds of data structures you would need to do a better job of modelling bibliographic data in a way that would enable (or at least make easier) some current library buzzwords.” One of those buzzwords is FRBR!
• Galen Charlton of Liblime posted Code4Lib 2008: RDA, a report on Karen Coyle’s talk at the conference.
• Peter Zimmerman’s notes on Sherry Vellucci’s Bibliographic Relationships in Music Catalogs (1997).