The FRBR Blog

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.