The FRBR Blog

A brief pointer to Jonathan Rochkind’s OCLC, and What We Lose Without Openness (A True Story), talking about the closed nature of OCLC and how the xID services, like xISBN, would benefit from opening up the source and data:

But maybe someone else wanted to work on an algorithm for doing this. Maybe they come up with something good. Maybe they want to provide such a service. As test data for their development, and to make such a finished service useful, they’d need a big corpus, like, WorldCat. Maybe OCLC would give them permission to use the WorldCat corpus like that–if they are willing to sign away certain rights on what to do with it, and if OCLC doens’t think it threatens WorldCat’s business model. But even having to ask and negotiate is a barrier to agile experimentation and innovation–there are plenty of people doing interesting stuff with not enough time, they don’t have time for legal negotiations with OCLC, and shouldn’t need to engage in them, it doesn’t serve us.

Preach it. Xiaoming Liu’s doing a great job, but he’s just one programmer.

Kevin Hawkins gave a talk earlier this month at the 2008 Annual TEI Members Meeting: FRBR Group 1 Entities and the TEI Guidelines (50 KB PDF). Slides for the talk are also available (288 KB PDF).

When speaking about literature or about text encoding, we sometimes use terms like work, text, and document quite loosely—so loosely, in fact, that you could hold an entire graduate-level seminar or publish a whole book to discuss the meanings of these three words. While lexical ambiguity is a common feature of human language, loose usage may point to a deeper ontological ambiguity—or simply a lack of clarity—over what is being discussed. The various members of a bibliographic family are confused not only by novice text encoders but also, I believe, by the many contributors to the TEI guidelines. Clarifying this confusion over what is the object of encoding may help us to get around some of our persistent problems in applying TEI markup and lead to texts that are more machine-readable than at present.

While there are many ontologies of bibliographic families, for this analysis I will apply the FRBR model to TEI text encoding.

TEI is the Text Encoding Initiative, and if you don’t know it, this section of their guidelines will give you an idea of how they’re marking up novels, poetry, plays, essays, nonfiction, etc.

Also, back in August, Hawkins gave a talk at Modern Information Technologies and Written Heritage: From Ancient Texts to Electronic Libraries in Russia.

• Entailment of Entities and Implicature of Attributes in the FRBR Model (72 KB PDF)
• Логическое следование сущностей и импликатура атрибутов в ER-модели «Функциональных требований к библиографическим записям» (Russian translation, 217 KB PDF)
• Slides for the talk (English) (159 KB PDF)

The full draft of Resource Description and Access (RDA), the new set of cataloguing rules, is available. You can download the whole thing from the “constituency review” page. I don’t know how long RDA is … but the table of contents is 74 pages. You might also want to look at thing like RDA Core Elements and FRBR User Tasks (57 KB PDF),

I’m going to look at some of this but let’s be honest, I’m not going to read every word of it. I’m interested in the FRBR side of it, especially how relationships are identified and recorded, but I’m not a cataloguer or a masochist. To keep up with what the cataloguers are saying you’ll want to read Planet Cataloguing, which will soon be abuzz with RDA chatter.

OpenFRBR’s showing a bunch of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban stuff now. I got ISBNs from thingISBN and xISBN, got MARC records (found them for about half of the ISBNs), processed it with the new version of the LC FRBRization tool (temporary location) that Jodi Schneider found out about, cleaned up some MARC records with bad 240/243/245 fields, and loaded it up into OpenFRBR. I’ll post some thoughts about all this later. I’m getting a better idea of what’s involved.

I listened to the latest episode in Dan Chudnov’s Library Geeks podcast series, 013 - Jangle, where Dan talks to Ross Singer about Jangle. I can’t stop myself from mentioning that around 18m50s Dan Chudnov says the word “item” reminds him of FRBR, and a little while later Singer mentions about FRBR and manifestations. If you’re a library geek you’ll want to hear the episode, but don’t do it for the FRBR.

Sample sentence, from Singer: “So there is a DLF ILS-DI adapter that meets the minimum criteria of the DLF ILS-DI API.”

I took an ISBN for a manifestation of Fifth Business, the great novel by Robertson Davies, and superduped it with my new superduping script. That left me with a list of ISBNs that xISBN and thingISBN think are other manifestations of the same work. I ran those ISBNs through isbn2marc and dumped out MARCXML. I ran that MARCXML through the LC FRBR Display Tool and ended up with an XML file that looks in part like this:

<work>
   <mods:name type="personal">
      <mods:namePart>Davies, Robertson</mods:namePart>
      <mods:role>
         <mods:text>creator</mods:text>
      </mods:role>
   </mods:name>
   <mods:titleInfo>
      <mods:title>World of wonders</mods:title>
   </mods:titleInfo>
   <expression>
      <mods:typeOfResource>text</mods:typeOfResource>
      <manifestation>
         <imprint>
            <mods:titleInfo>
               <mods:title>World of wonders</mods:title>
            </mods:titleInfo>
            <mods:note type="statement of responsiblity">Robertson Davies.</mods:note>
            <mods:originInfo>
               <mods:publisher>Penguin books</mods:publisher>
               <mods:dateIssued>1977</mods:dateIssued>
            </mods:originInfo>
            <mods:physicalDescription>
               <mods:extent>315 p ; 20 cm.</mods:extent>
            </mods:physicalDescription>
            <mods:identifier type="ISBN">0-14-016796-X (pbk)</mods:identifier>
         </imprint>
      </manifestation>
   </expression>
</work>

I wrote a script that reads that file, picks out the bits that OpenFRBR can use, and loads it up into the system. (script/runner lets you use the Rails environment from the command line.)

The results are on OpenFRBR now. I’m going to keep on this track for a bit to see how much I can get out of the LC tool and what bits are missing. I ran into some trouble along the way with character encodings but for now I just remove troublesome MARC records. Now I can go give Jodi Schneider’s paper a good read!

• LCCN Support and Other Improvements in xID Service, an update from OCLC’s Xiaoming Liu.
• David Weinberger had dinner with Sam Oh in April and talked about FRBR.
• Sam Oh’s slides from his ATOMS 2007 talk Topic Maps-Driven Semantic Services for National Library of Korea (3.6 MB PDF).

This isn’t FRBR-related, but I’m on the hiring committee and we want to get the announcement out everywhere we can. York University Libraries has created a new position and is looking for an Electronic Resources Librarian.

The Electronic Resources Librarian will provide leadership and expertise in the effective acquisition, management and promotion of electronic collections for the Libraries. Working closely with the Associate University Librarian for Collections, the successful candidate will monitor trends and developments in electronic resources, collaborate with subject specialist/liaison librarians to identify potential new acquisitions, work with publishers and vendors to coordinate trials, and solicit and evaluate user feedback. In collaboration with library colleagues, the incumbent will develop and implement a dynamic promotion plan for the York community that raises awareness of and increases use of electronic collections. He/she will also develop and implement qualitative assessment measures, analyze and disseminate usage data, and prepare reports to assist in timely collections decision-making. The incumbent will assist in troubleshooting, responding to user inquiries and following up on access and maintenance problem resolution. He/she will participate in library-wide committees and will represent the Libraries at regional, provincial and national consortia (e.g. OCUL), organizations and initiatives.

John Dupuis, head of the science library, posted the job ad too, and if you have any questions you should probably ask him so I can stay pure. For other York library blogs, see Planet YUL.

Jodi Schneider is one of the #code4lib regulars and an editor of the Code4Lib Journal. In May she did a paper for library school and a couple of nights ago she pointed it out to me in IRC: FRBRizing MARC Records with the FRBR Display Tool.

Who Should Read this Report

This paper is aimed at three audiences:

• Administrators who need to understand what FRBR is, how it benefits library users, and why trends towards increased digitization are making FRBRization even more important
• Researchers interested in automatic methods for FRBRizing MARC records
• Users of the FRBR Display Tool

I did some experimenting with the LC FRBR display tool last year, and am back doing more with it now, so I will read this with great interest!

It’s good to see library school students putting their papers online. I encourage all students to put their best papers on the web. Everybody benefits, especially the students.

In April 2007 I wrote zmarc.rb, which took an ISBN and dumped out a MARC record for it. As part of OpenFRBR I did more work on it and now it’s isbn2marc. You may have better ways of getting MARC records, possibly not involving Z39.50, perhaps also in Ruby, but this does what I need for now. Patches welcome.

# USAGE
#
# isbn2marc [-q] [-d marcfile] [-x xmlfile] ISBN
#
# -q          Run quietly, don't list servers queried and don't
#             dump MARC to STDOUT
#             By default isbn2marc tells STDERR what it's doing
#
# -d marcfile Dump MARC record to file
#
# -x xmlfile  Dump MARCXML record to file

# EXAMPLES
#
# Find a MARC record for the first volume of Casanova's HISTORY OF
# MY LIFE and pretty print it:
#
# $ isbn2marc 0801856620
#
# Find a MARC record for Terry Pratchett's THIEF OF TIME and write
# a binary MARC file to disk as well as pretty printing it:
#
# $ isbn2marc -d thief.marc 0552148407
#
# Find a MARC record for the first omnibus volume of the University of
# Chicago Press's edition of Anthony Powell's A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME,
# but don't show the record on the screen:
#
# $ isbn2marc -q -d stringham.marc -x templer.xml 0226677141
#
# Find MARC records for all ISBNs in a file and save them on disk:
#
# $ cat isbns.txt
# 0439064864
# 0439064872
# 0439136350
# 0439136369
# 0439139600
# 059035342X
# 0736646736
# $ isbn2marc -f isbns.txt -d harry-potter.marc
#
# Find a MARC record but don't display it or save it:
#
# $ isbn2marc -q 0195024028
#
# You'd be a bit silly to run that often.