The FRBR Blog

I’m about to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the Norton Critical Edition, third edition, edited by Robert Kimbrough . A friend has to read it for a course and since I’ve never read it I said I’d give it a go and we’d talk about it. The Norton edition has the novel, but the text changed in different editions, so the editor did a lot of work preparing this version and explains what he did and why. The novel is 69 pages long and there are about 350 pages of other stuff: writings on the Congo, other writings by Conrad and his contemporaries, criticism, a map, a bibliography, etc. While looking at it and reading about the various texts, I thought, “This would be a hard book to fully FRBRize.”

Last month Galen Charlton posted Frankenstein, or the Modern FRBR on the Liblime Developers’ Blog. He was looking at the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, and wrote a nice long post looking at how bibliographically complicated it is and how rich and useful but difficult it will be to capture all of the bibliographic information and relationships involved.

If you’re part of a group working on a new library discovery layer, or some kind of similar tool(s), keep these kinds of books in mind. If a vendor says they do FRBR, ask them if they mean they use xISBN (and thingISBN?) or if they can actually get medieval on a work like this.

(I saw this posted on David Bigwood’s Catalogablog.)

The Future of Cataloging: A Palinet Symposium was held on 29 May 2008. It looks like it was a really interesting day, so go have a look. I mention it specially because John Attig of Pennsylvania State University gave a talk called “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Current Development and Implementation Plans for Resource Description and Access (RDA).” The slides and audio for all of the talks are up, so pop over and download.

My net connection at home has been b0rked so my regular posting habits were interrupted. I’ve fallen behind but will catch up as I can.

The anonymous Scribe posted FRBR and FRAD and RDA, Oh My last Thursday, which was my introduction to some recent discussion I’d missed. Seems that FRBR and FRAD define the Person entity differently. Here’s what they say. First, from FRBR 4.6.1 Attributes of a Person :

“A person may be known by more than one name, or by more than one form of the same name. A bibliographic agency normally selects one of those names as the uniform heading for purposes of consistency in naming and referencing the person. The other names or forms of name may be treated as variant names for the person. In some cases (e.g., in the case of a person who writes under more than one pseudonym, or a person who writes both in an official capacity and as an individual) the bibliographic agency may establish more than one uniform heading for the person.”

And then from FRAD, 3.4 Entity Definitions:

An individual or a persona established or adopted by an individual or group. [FRBR, modified]

Includes real individuals.

Includes personas established or adopted by an individual through the use of more than one name (e.g., the individual’s real name and/or one or more pseudonyms).

Includes personas established or adopted jointly by two or more individuals (e.g., Ellery Queen — joint pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee).

Includes personas established or adopted by a group (e.g., Betty Crocker).

Quoth Scribe:

As smarter people than me said on the listserv, if you read these closely, with an eye towards personas (think Mark Twain for Samuel Clemens), you will quickly see that these two standards (which came out of the same institution!) are not similar, and deal with the idea of personas quite differently.

The issue, then, is…RDA is only taking its person definitions from FRAD. For me, this is just another signal that RDA, which is kind of supposed to be based on FRBR, is falling farther and farther away from FRBR, while all the regular librarians out there are still trying to wrap their heads around FRBR in a vain attempt to understanding how RDA will work when it comes out. How gratifying it will be when RDA comes out and all the people who thought they understood what was coming, don’t.

I’m not on that mailing list (though I will be) so I missed it. But I can catch up by browsing the archives of the DC-RDA mailing list. Diane Hillmann’s New RDA Vocabularies available (plus other info) is the first in the thread. Here’s a quote from one of Karen Coyle’s follow-ups:

In libraries we have the case where the *person* element in FRBR is not a real person (I had this as a long discussion on another list), it’s “the preferred name of some entity that uses a form of personal name in its authorship role.” If a dog ever writes a book and calls himself Dewey W. Dog, he will be a FRBR person. Already today, two people writing a book under one name are a FRBR person for the purposes of library metadata, and one person writing under a variety of different names is different persons. Which is why it will be hard to connect library data to, for example, other data using FOAF. Even where the names and email addresses are the same, they aren’t really describing the same thing. This is something I worry about as we contemplate setting library loose on the Web.

Quoth John Hostage, information coordinator of the IFLA Cataloguing Section, on the FRBR mailing list on Monday: “A German translation of the text of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) as amended and Japanese translations of the recently published errata and the amendment to the expression entity have been made available through IFLANET.”

• Updated German translation (628 KB PDF)
• Japanese errata (124 KB PDF)

There are translations in: Chinese, Croatian, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese.

Earlier this year some people (starting with Stuart Weibel, and then for example Scribe and Kathryn Greenhill) were talking about GLIMIR, OCLC’s proposed Global Library Manifestation Identifier. It would, as you’ve already figured out, be a way of identifying manifestations. Usually people think of ISBNs as doing this, but publishers can do funny things and mistakes happen, and ISBNs have only been around for about forty years. A universally agreed-upon (well, even terrestrially would do) way of identifying manifestations would be useful. Of course, so would a way of unambiguously identifying works and expressions!

Anyhoo, I asked at the time if there was anything public about GLIMIR, and was told no. I haven’t heard anything more since then, and didn’t find any news after a bit of looking around. It was on my mind as something to follow up on, though, so this is a just a post about negative results.

The American Library Association’s 2008 conference is in Anaheim, California, at the end of this month. I spy two FRBR-related sessions on the program so far:

• Saturday 28 June, 4:00 – 5:30: Getting Ready for RDA and FRBR: What You Need to Know.
• Sunday 29 June, 1:30 – 5:30: You Know FRBR, But Have You Ever Met FRAD. “To improve search and retrieval experiences for users, the data modeling concepts of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records)- work, expression, manifestation, and item – have been incorporated into RDA (Resource Description and Access) and elsewhere. FRBR has been extended to both name and subject authority data through the work of FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data) and FRSAR (Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records). Speakers will describe the status of this work to date.”

I don’t try to keep up with all of the FRBR-related conference sessions any more — there are too many now — but if slides or audio go up for any, or people blog about them, I’m glad to post a link if I know.

Version 1.0 of the Bibliographic Ontology Specification is out. There’s no explicit mention of FRBR in it, but it’s certainly FRBR-informed, as one can see by searching their mailing list archives.

“The Bibliographic Ontology Specification provides main concepts and properties for describing citations and bibliographic references (i.e. quotes, books, articles, etc) on the Semantic Web…. This ontology can be used as a citation ontology, as a document classification ontology, or simply as a way to describe any kind of document in RDF. It has been inspired by many existing document description metadata formats, and can be used as a common ground for converting other bibliographic data sources.”

This will be a very useful thing to use with any FRBR/Semantic Web work. Congratulations to the people behind this.

First there was FRBR & “Time-Based” Media, Part 1, and then there was Part 2: Clips/Segments. Following a strict arithmetic progression, Pete Johnston posted Part 3: Stills and Part 4: Alternate Forms & Supplementary Materials.

One commenter posted about Part 3: “Makes my head spin.” That’s what makes it fun!

I was on vacation for a bit, but now I’m back, and I’ll be catching up. (I almost have Ruby on Rails working on my Eee (which I like a lot, it’s great); when I do I plan to have some work to show.) But first, some nice things I’ve missed.

You remember WoGroFuBiCo and the interesting report they wrote. Well, Associate Librarian Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress wrote a 75-page response to WoGroFuBiCo’s report On The Record (441 KB PDF). Here are the FRBR-related bits for easy reference.

3.2.5 Suspend Work on RDA

3.2.5.1 JSC: Suspend further new development work on RDA until a) use and business cases for moving to RDA have been satisfactorily articulated, b) the presumed benefits of RDA have been demonstrated, and c) more, large-scale, comprehensive testing of FRBR as it relates to proposed provisions of RDA has been carried out against real cataloging data, and the results of those tests have been analyzed (see 4.2.1 below)

LC Response and Rationale

LC could not wait until June 1 to take action on this recommendation. In considering the three recommendations under 3.2.5, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Agricultural Library (NAL) met in March 2008 to discuss obstacles to development and implementation of RDA. At this meeting, LC, NAL, and NLM agreed to proceed jointly to develop, complete, test, analyze costs and benefits, and schedule a decision on implementation of RDA, an important international initiative. Testing will include usability testing by bibliographic access production staff as well as compatibility testing with existing records. The three national libraries issued a joint statement on May 1, 2008.

Action: Current

The three national libraries, in collaboration with others, are developing the appropriate tests of RDA.

Action: Planned

LC will carry out tests in 2009.

4.2.1 Develop Test Plan for FRBR

4.2.1.1 LC, OCLC, IFLA Working Group, and Representative Vendors: Identify what agreements are necessary to support FRBR in bibliographic systems, including the full range of entity relationships defined in the FRBR model.

LC Response and Rationale

Support. It is possible that RDA testing is the best, most feasible, and economical way to glean the information needed to achieve this, in collaboration with system vendors and OCLC.

Action: Current

LC, NAL, and NLM, will conduct usability and compatibility testing of RDA during 2009, before implementing the new code in production.

Action: Planned

LC recommends no further concrete steps until the community can examine the outcomes of the RDA testing.

4.2.1.2 LC, OCLC, IFLA Working Group, and Representative System Vendors: Develop and agree upon a schema for the exchange of Work-based data.

LC Response and Rationale

Support, since this is essential to a completely FRBR-based system.

Action: Current

LC has expended and continues to devote significant resources to the development of FRBR.

Action: Planned

LC recommends no further concrete steps until after results of RDA testing are examined.

4.2.1.3 LC, OCLC, IFLA Working Group, and Representative System Vendors: Verify the need to provide distinct metadata at the Expression level and, if appropriate, carry out work similar to that described in 4.2.1.1 and 4.2.1.2 for that entity.

LC Response and Rationale

Support; please see response under 4.2.1.1 and 4.2.1.2.

4.2.1.4 LC, OCLC, IFLA Working Group, and Representative System Vendors: Use the results of the above activity as the basis for promulgating and evaluating FRBR implementations.

LC Response and Rationale

Support, because FRBR promises improvements in the user experience of the catalog and greater success in finding, identifying, selecting, obtaining, and using library resources.

Action: Current

LC devotes significant resources to ongoing development of both FRBR and RDA and will be heavily involved in the testing of RDA planned for 2009.

Action: Planned

Use the outcomes of RDA testing to inform plans to promulgate and evaluate FRBR implementations.