The FRBR Blog

A quick pointer to a blog post from Mr. LibraryThing, Tim Spalding, from Thursday: Works, Editions, ISBNs and Cocktails. Tim’s definition of a work is a convivial one:

Since the beginning I’ve promoted the idea of the “cocktail party” test. This test answers whether two books belong to the same work by asking whether their readers would, in casual conversation, own up to reading the same book or not. So, for example, in such a context it wouldn’t matter if you had read a book in its hardcover or paperback edition, or listened to it on CD. If the cute girl with the backless dress mentions she’s fond of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the edition is immaterial…. I also suspect that title differences occasioned by marketing considerations—eg., Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (UK) vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (US)—wouldn’t matter. Nor should language itself matter; few would turn a cold shoulder to a Finnish Tolkien fan merely because he read Tolkien in Finnish.

To the old title-author pairs, he says he’s “added ISBNs to the mix, so members can combine and separate editions looking at and according to their ISBNs.” It’ll be interesting to see how this refinement improves work groupings. LibraryThing users do good basic FRBRization.

The final draft of IFLA’s Statement of International Cataloguing Principles is now up on IFLA’s web site. (It was up in a temporary location for a little while.) Comments are welcome until the end of June.

The Statement of Principles – commonly known as the “Paris Principles” – was approved by
the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles in 1961. Its goal of serving as a basis
for international standardization in cataloguing has certainly been achieved: most of the
cataloguing codes that were developed worldwide since that time followed the Principles
strictly, or at least to a high degree.

Over forty years later, having a common set of international cataloguing principles has become
even more desirable as cataloguers and their clients use OPACs (Online Public Access
Catalogues) around the world. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, an effort has been
made by IFLA to adapt the Paris Principles to objectives that are applicable to online library
catalogues and beyond. The first of these objectives is to serve the convenience of the users of
the catalogue.

… These new principles build on the great cataloguing traditions of the world, and also on the
conceptual models of the IFLA documents Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
(FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD), which extend the Paris
Principles to the realm of subject cataloguing.

(I talk a bit about this in FRBR and the History of Cataloguing, written when the principles were in an earlier draft.)

Earlier this week OCLC announced xOCLCNUM, which is like xISBN except that instead of giving it an ISBN and getting back related ISBNs, you give it an OCLC number and get back related OCLC numbers.

Timothy McCormick included this in his e-mail to the code4lib mailing list about it: “ISBNs have been assigned since 1970, to most but not all books published. OCLC numbers are assigned whenever a record is added to WorldCat, OCLC’s global union catalog. These records cover a large portion of all books, old and new, held by any library in North America and, increasingly other regions worldwide (most recently, National Library of China: see http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/20085.htm). So the coverage range of OCLC numbers is, not surprisingly, far greater than that of ISBNs: in WorldCat, for example, around 100 million OCLCnums compared to about 20 million ISBNs.”

Very useful.

An IFLA satellite meeting on RDA is happening on Friday 8 August 2008, in the Château Laurier in Quebec City, one of Canada’s finest hotels. If you’re in town early for the 2008 conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and you want to learn more about where RDA is at, check it out. FRBR will be discussed!

I won’t be there, but I’ll be at the conference proper.

I have a number of things to catch up on this week, and I begin with two more papers that Martha Yee has pulled from her archives (her fonds, actually, as I think we’d say in Canada):

• “Manifestations and Near-Equivalents: Theory, with Special Attention to Moving-Image Materials.” Library Resources & Technical Services 1994; 38:227-256. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2864
• “Manifestations and Near-Equivalents of Moving Image Works: a Research Project.” Library Resources & Technical Services 1994; 38:355-372. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2858

Someone tagged Thursday’s Unshelved comic strip with frbr at Delicious. If you start at Monday’s strip you can see the whole week’s series, which are grounded in FRBR-based humour about the item entity.

(If the library has multiple copies of the book the woman wanted (multiple items of the same manifestation, probably), then why didn’t Dewey give one to her in the first place? Why say he’d reserve one if they were on the shelf?)

On 25 June 2005 I announced this blog to the FRBR mailing list and elsewhere. Any suggestions for what to do here to celebrate? Aside from preparing for the One Big Library Unconference two days later, that is.

Hello,

I was able to go to the May FRBR workshop hosted by IFLA and OCLC, and it
was very interesting and thought-provoking.  I'm really glad I was there.
One of the things that struck me was that many smart people are working on
FRBR but it's hard for the average person to follow it all.  It's
especially hard for people out of the loop of academic journals and
association memberships.  There's this mailing list, of course, but I got
to thinking that a FRBR weblog would be useful.

So I started one.  I've set up

http://www.frbr.org/

and filled it with some things I'd had bookmarked.  Please have a look
and tell me any suggestions or comments you have, especially including
good things to link to.  If you have something FRBRish on the web, or a
paper in a journal somewhere, I'd love to hear about it.

I hope that over the next few months I'll have lots of interesting links
to post, and that the blog becomes a useful resource for people--not just
librarians, but anyone interested in FRBR--wanting to stay up to date.

RSS feeds are available, and comments are allowed on all the entries.

• Outcomes of the Meeting of the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA, 13-22 April 2008. And I thought my meeting Tuesday afternoon was long! Among other things: “The ALA response to the December 2007 draft suggested refinements to the existing organization of RDA. One proposal was that there be a chapter on each of the FRBR Group 1 entities in this order: work, expression, manifestation, and item. The JSC decided to retain the existing organization based on FRBR user tasks.” And: “The JSC will meet from November 9-18 in Ottawa, Canada. At this meeting, the JSC will finalize the text for the first release of RDA.” I haven’t been keeping up with the draft; I’ll wait until November. Those JSC people must be damned busy. I bet they dream about RDA.
• Joint Statement of the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agricultural Library on Resource Description and Access (51 KB PDF), with introduction by Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress, in response to the WoGroFuBiCo report. As they said on The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour, “Stay calm. Be brave. Wait for the signs.”
• Jenn Riley’s LC Statement on RDA from last week is one of numerous comments on it on blogs.

Pete Johnston posted FRBR & “Time-Based” Media, Part 1 and FRBR & “Time-Based” Media, Part 2: Clips/Segments and perhaps more will follow. Go give them a read.

Suppose I develop a machinima-based tutorial video introducing some of the features of Second Life for use by undergraduate students new to the application. I might make my tutorial available for streaming using my institution’s streaming server, both in Windows Media Video format and in QuickTime format. And I might make a QuickTime version available for download as an alternative to streaming. I might also make a second copy of that QuickTime file – exactly the same content, quality, size etc – available for download from my personal Web site.

From a FRBR viewpoint, I think this would be represented as a single FRBR Work (W01), realized in a single Expression (E01), embodied in three different Manifestations (streamed Windows Media Video (M01), streamed QuickTime (M02) and downloadable QuickTime (M03)), with the first two of these Manifestations each exemplified in a single Item, and the last exemplified in two Items.

And then it gets complicated!

Mick Eadie, Towards an Application Profile for Images, from Ariadne 55 (April 2008). A quote:

However, after much investigation and consultation, it was decided ultimately that FRBR did not address our requirements for the IAP [Images Application Profile]. In essence what is being done by FRBR is not the modelling of the simple image and its relationships, but rather an attempt to model the artistic / intellectual process and all resultant manifestations of it. We decided this was inappropriate for the IAP for number of reasons. While possible, an application profile of this complexity would require detailed explanation that could be a barrier to take-up. Moreover, it strays from the core remit of the IAP to facilitate a simple exchange of image data between repositories. While the FRBR approach attempts to build relationships between objects, e.g. slides, photographs, objects and digital surrogates, this facility already exists in, for example, the Visual Resources Association Core (VRA) schema. Our intention was not to reinvent or in any way replicate existing standards that are robust and heavyweight enough to deal with most image types. Rather our intention was to build a lightweight layer that could sit above these standards, and work with them, facilitating a simple image search across institutional repositories.