The FRBR Blog

From Progress on finding works, e-mail sent by Edward Betts to the ol-discuss list:

http://edwardbetts.com/ol/Arthur_Conan_Doyle.html lists 393 titles
found for books by Arthur Conan Doyle, sorted by the number of library
records for each title. The top of the list pretty clearly shows works
by the author. Some of the errors at the bottom of the list are caused
by titles entered in a foreign language, I think I might be able to
match some of these automatically. The table can be resorted by title.

Follow the thread for replies.

From the BBC Radio Labs blog: In Search of Cultural Identifiers (lots of links missing–go read the full post)

OpenLibrary are looking to enhance this model to allow grouping of publications into works which is fantastic news. If you can contribute code or knowledge I’d encourage you to do so. And the BBC isn’t all that interested in products. Neither are users.

If I tell someone that I’m reading Crash they generally don’t care if I’m reading this version or this version or this version. What’s interesting isn’t the product but the cultural artifact. It’s the same story with programmes. Radio 7′s David Copperfield isn’t a dramatisation of this or this or this, it’s a dramatisation of this – the abstract cultural artifact or work.

The problem is probably so obvious it hardly warrants a blog post but now I’ve started… Lots of websites exist to shift products. So when they’re created the developers model products not looser cultural artifacts. And because the cultural artifact isn’t modelled it doesn’t have a URL, isn’t aggregatable and can’t be pointed at. As Tom Coates pointed out people use links to explain, disambiguate and clarify meaning. If something isn’t given a URL it doesn’t exist in the vocabulary of the web.

(Via Ed Summers and Eduardo Leite.)

• University of Toronto Libraries, which I think is the third biggest university library system in North America, launched their new Endeca-based catalogue. Congratulations to them for doing a very nice job. Alastair Boyd, head of cataloguing, said they did FRBRization at the Expression level, not the Work level. His example was a search for ariadne auf naxos, where you can see the libretto and score with multiple Manifestations underneath each.
• IFLA Cataloguing Section’s Annual Report 2008 (74 KB PDF). They’re the people from whom FRBR, FRAD, and FRSAR emerged. The minutes of the meetings in Québec City in August 2008 (244 KB PDF) are up too. (I thought they were new but I noticed I linked to them last November.)
• Xiaoming Liu posted about Guessing Publisher from ISBN Prefix, a new addition to xISBN.

Dan Brickley points out a review of FRBR on the W3C’s Media Annotations Working Group wiki.

“I have no idea if anyone looks at comments on month old messages” said Joe Hourclé a couple of weeks ago. I do, but sometimes I don’t follow up fast enough, such as my delay in pointing out this preprint: FRBR Applied to Scientific Data (266 KB PDF).

ABSTRACT: The distinction between a creative work and the physical item that contains that work is clearly delineated in FRBR and other research by the Library Science community. A similar confusion exists in the scientific realm between the underlying scientific data and the digital objects that contain those data. We present a similarly scoped reference framework for sensor-based scientific data, drawing on the concepts in FRBR, and compare it with the application of FRBR for cataloging other non-book records.

International Standard Text Code Agency Announces New Registration Agency Appointments says:

The International ISTC Agency, the official Registration Authority for the International Standard Text Code (ISTC), is pleased to announce its appointment of Bowker and Nielsen Book as ISTC registration agencies that are now authorized to assign ISTCs on behalf of publishers, authors and content owners.

An approved ISO standard (ISO 21047), the ISTC provides a means of uniquely and persistently identifying textual works in information systems, and facilitates the exchange of information about such works between publishers, authors and authors associations, collective management organizations, libraries, search engines and others on an international level. More information regarding the ISTC standard is available at www.ISTC-International.org, the new official web site of the International ISTC Agency.

There was discussion on AUTOCAT after this. Tim “Mr. LibraryThing” Spalding spoke up and called me out by name but I just noticed it now. :( Rob Richard replied: “I disagree with your comment that ‘FRBR appears to be primarily designed as a mechanism for producing conference papers. It’s been out for ages and almost nothing has come of it.’” Heh.

• Ed Summers, 10,000 Books and FRBR: “The news about 100,000 books on Freebase got me poking around with curl. I was pleased to see that Freebase actually distinguishes between a book as a work, and a particular edition of that book. To FRBR aficionados this will be familiar as the difference between a Work and a Manifestation.”
• Karen Coyle, FRBR and Group 2 & 3 Oddities: “This time I was thinking about the way that the entities are used with the subject relationship. But before I get to that, there’s always the publisher to torment me.”
• Future4catalogers’ Blog, all about RDA.
• Jonathan Rochkind, Of Identifiers, Matching, OCLCnums, and Umlaut: “Another source of this same data is the OCLC xID services, that would also let Umlaut take an LCCN and figure out what OCLCnum or ISBN or ISSN might also apply to that title, and vice versa. Umlaut doesn’t currently use xID, but should.”
• Joe Hourcle?, Thoughs on Aggregate Works in FRBR: “Aggregate works are a form of collection, and we can potentially have many different forms of collections. Collections may be aggregated in a single manifestation, or they may exist as a series of independant aggregations.”

Quoting e-mail Jennifer Bowen sent around:

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project at the University of Rochester announces the release of a major white paper describing the project’s approach to metadata. The paper describes how the development of an XML schema for XC and the creation of a platform for enriching and transforming metadata (the XC Metadata Services Toolkit) benefit not only future users of the XC software, but also the broader library community.

“Supporting the eXtensible Catalog through Metadata Design and Services”
by Jennifer Bowen (Co-Principal Investigator, XC Project) is now
available at the project’s website at
http://www.extensiblecatalog.org/MetadataReports

The XC Schema is designed to enable the reuse of MARC catalog data alongside metadata from other metadata schemas within a variety of web environments. The schema’s FRBRized structure and inclusion of some RDA elements will provide libraries with an opportunity to work with metadata records that bear a strong resemblance to records that will eventually be created using RDA.

The XC Metadata Services Toolkit can be used to enrich, transform, manage and provide basic authority control for batches of metadata records in any XML schema, including MARCXML. It can provide a useful platform for testing new metadata standards and schemas and an invaluable learning environment for libraries as they become accustomed to new metadata standards such as RDA.

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) is a collaborative project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and by XC Partner institutions. The XC Software will be released later in 2009 under an open source license. More information about the XC Project is available at www.extensiblecatalog.org

Jennifer Bowen
eXtensible Catalog Project
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York