The FRBR Blog

• 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.

I just came across The Catalogue Display of the Future?, posted by Fiacre O’Duinn on his blog on 20 April. (He’s coming to the One Big Library Unconference in June.) It pulls together some interesting stuff about how FRBR could affect catalogue interfaces.

Karen Coyle sent Progress Report: RDA Vocabularies Project to the rda-l mailing list. “Note that the FRBR entities have been entered into the NSDL metadata registry sandbox [4] along with the FRBR relationships [5] and the FRBR user tasks [6].”

But then Diane Hillmann followed up to say, “The NSDL Registry now has the new version of its schema registration capability available, including the provisional registration of the RDA element vocabulary. Go to http://metadataregistry.org, and click on ’schemas’ in the right hand side browse list. Or go directly to: http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/1.html and click on the ‘Properties’ tab to see he currently registered properties.”

Ingbert R. Floyd and Allen H. Renear’s What Exactly Is an Item in the Digital World? is up in their university’s repository. (”Institutional repositories,” for those of you unfamiliar with the term, are web sites where people can put stuff. Which is no big deal, except that they’re official and run by an institution — probably a university or its library — and there are probably more good intentions about putting stuff into them then actual stuff getting uploaded.) It’s a five-page paper but it says it’s a poster from the 2007 ASIST conference, so I don’t know. Floyd’s new to the blog but Renear’s been mentioned before.

ABSTRACT: IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is a model of the bibliographic universe. Although initially its application to the digital world appears to be straightforward, upon closer examination puzzles arise. One is that within the digital world it is surprisingly difficult to say exactly what FRBR items really are. On the one hand, the ontological candidates for items (concrete physical states of the computing system) are rarely identified and treated as items in practice — even though they may indeed be affirmed as items in theoretical discussions. On the other hand, objects that manifestly fail to meet the basic ontological criteria for FRBR items are commonly treated as if they are items. We describe this situation and, based on a re-factoring of FRBR into a set of roles (relationships) rather than a set of entity types explore two possible resolutions. One, favored by the second author, is consistent with ontology implicit in the original FRBR vision, but allows assignment of item attributes and roles to things that are not items; the other, favored by the first author, is a radical departure from the underlying FRBR ontology, but preserves the original attribute assignments and roles.

Presentations by Peter Cliff of UKOLN, including one from a conference on 22 April 2008: FRBR and Metadata Application Profiles (4 MB Power Point).

Interesting: He tagged resources used in the presentation at http://del.icio.us/tag/vifws2008-frbr. Nice.

catprinciples.pbwiki.com was set up so that people could have early access to the final draft of the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (55 KB PDF). The document sets out the basic rules that IFLA says should underpin all cataloguing codes. It’s short, and the Statement is grounded in FRBR and FRAD. It’ll move to IFLA’s web site soon and I’ll post the fresh link.

The Statement of Principles – commonly known as the “Paris Principles” – was approved the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles in 1961. Its goal of serving as a 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 replace and broaden the Paris Principles from just textual works to all types of materials and from just the choice and form of entry to all aspects of bibliographic and authority data used in library catalogues.

… 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.

Sam Gyun Oh gave a talk at Topic Maps 2008 called MARC, FRBR and RDA: The Topic Maps Perspective. “So can librarians save the world? This presentation argues that they can at least make a significant contribution to solving the problem of infoglut, but only if they update their skill set and understand how the concepts they have worked with for decades can be applied using modern technologies like Topic Maps.” Slides available as PDF or PPT.

Thom Hickey, of OCLC fame, posted FRBR and Uniform Titles on his blog Tuesday.

AACR2 lists four uses for uniform titles, but the most common is to group items that appear with multiple titles under a single heading. Works such as Don Quixote that are published in multiple languages and under hundreds of different titles benefit from this. Unfortunately, when trying to group manifestations into works, uniform titles do not always correspond to what anyone would consider a work.