The FRBR Blog

• Edward Betts from the Open Library: Works pages live on Open Library staging. Openly accessibly work-manifestation groupings, with work identifiers. In test still. This is big. Here’s Murder On the Orient Express.
• Martin Malmsten, Making a Library Catalogue Part of the Semantic Web, from Proceedings of International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2008. Linked data! Here’s one edition of Murder On the Orient Express in Libris, Sweden’s national union catalogue. In the source is a linked to the same information RDF and you’ll notice “frbr-related” links to other records.
• The FRBRy Variations Digital Music Library System software is now available on Sourceforge! “Variations provides online access to streaming audio and scanned score images with a flexible access control framework to ensure respect for intellectual property. In addition to access tools, Variations also includes analysis and annotation tools useful in music teaching and learning. With Variations, institutions can digitize recordings and scores from their own collections and provide those materials to their students and faculty in support of teaching, learning, and research.”

• Bernie Sloan sent Personal perspectives on library use to ngc4lib and a long thread started
• I posted and said in part “I’m starting to think an Internet-scale open bibliographic metadata commons (with complete FRBRization) is coming soon, and if we’re not the ones who make it, the rest of the Semantic Web people will make it for us with the parts we’ve made available so far, and lots of librarians will sit in their basement cubicles wondering why no-one else listens when they tell each other how important their work is.”
• Tim “Mr. LibraryThing” Spalding followed up, pointed out something I’d missed, and said “LibraryThing members are doing *6,000* FRBR acts per day now. That’s a minimum of 12,000 works combined. Similar effort goes into author combinations, identification of ‘distinct’ homonymous authors, etc. etc.”
• Then Karen Coyle posted FRBRization in LT and a new interesting thread took off. Poke around the archives if you’re not on the list.

There are a number of “This Week in ___” summaries out there. I’m behind on things, so I’m going to catch up on some old stuff. Call it “Last Week in FRBR.”

I’d like to change frbr.org into something involving other people. FRBR’s far more widely known and used now than it was in May 2005 when I started this blog. My interests have evolved and my work has changed. More on this in another post.

• Ed Summers, Work Identifers and the Web. “Both OCLC Worldcat and LibraryThing mint URIs for bibliographic works…. [T]he library community really does web identifiers for works–or more precisely web identifiers for human readable records about works. What’s missing (IMHO) is the ability to use that identifier to get back something meaningful for a machine.”
• Phil Barker, Identifiers for UK OER “Works.” “Would it be useful and feasible to have a single identifier to link together all the instances of a learning resource?”
• Xiaoming Liu, New xISBN Bookmarklets Supports Thousands of Libraries. “The previous xISBN bookmarket supports more than 300 libraries, however, the list was manually maintained and it’s challenging to keep these links up-to-date, By ingesting good Registry OPAC information into xISBN bookmarklet, we are able to support thousands more libraries in a more sustainable way.”
• Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba, FRBRizing Legacy Data: Issues and Challenges(1.1 MB PDF), slides from 24 January 2009 ALA Midwinter talk. As part of the Kent State FRBR project they took the OCLC FRBR Work-Set Algorithm, experimented with it, and hacked on it a bit.
• Alastair Miles, Re: datasets for testing rda at scale, from the DC-RDA mailing list archives. “This is just an update to say that I’ve converted the LOC/data to marc xml and from there to mods xml. My next step is do some analysis of the loc data in mods xml to get an overview of the elements used, then to try to design at least a partial mapping from mods xml to RDF using the RDA and FRBR schemas.”

Coming up: in a couple of weeks Jodi Schneider and I are giving a talk at Code4Lib 2009: “What We Talk About When We Talk About FRBR.” I’ll link to the video when it’s up.

httpRange-14, Cool URIs & FRBR, by Pete Johnston, on the eFoundations blog.

… document uses the terms “Web documents” and “real-world objects” to refer to the two classes of resources, noting that the latter class includes “real-world objects like people and cars, and even abstract ideas and non-existing things like a mythical unicorn”.

The question raised by this division is where the boundary between the two classes lies….

I’ve been trying to think through how this set of conventions should be applied to the case of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and more specifically to the “FRBR Group 1 Entities”, i.e. instances of the the classes of Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item which FRBR uses to model the universe of resources described by bibliographic records.

I gave a talk last Friday at the Ontario Library Association 2009 Super Conference with York University music cataloguer Stacy Allison Cassin: One Big Library.

• Slides of One Big Library talk (7.8 MB PDF)
• Audio of One Big Library talk (14 MB MP3, 58 minutes)

We explain our vision of the One Big Library (inspired by Wendy Newman and Dan Chudnov) and how Christopher Alexander’s idea of pattern languages can help us build it. We end with three things we want people to do:

1. Live and work in the One Big Library.
2. Build the library pattern language.
3. Help people build, manage, and share their personal branches of the One Big Library.