The FRBR Blog

• VTLS Announces FRBR Software as a Service, Available Now for All Libraries with any OPAC. “VTLS Inc, a leading global company providing Visionary Technology in Library Solutions, announces an industry first: FRBR Software as a Service. Now, all libraries can present FRBR-enhanced records to their end users without having to FRBRize their entire database, while keeping and using their current ILS. FRBR SaaS builds on a library’s own ILS database and web-based online public catalog by providing a hosted database of matching FRBR records, an online public interface designed to match the source database, and hyperlinks to provide seamless navigation between the two.”
• LibraryThing: New API: What Work? “I’ve added a small, but nifty new API that provides a sure-wife way of connecting any site’s book data to LibraryThing. The ‘What work?’ API takes an ISBN and/or the book title and author and returns the LibraryThing work number, with link URL in XML.” Example: http://www.librarything.com/api/whatwork.php?title=Harry+Potter+and+the+Goblet+of+Fire. “In sum, if you can’t connect your data to LibraryThing now, you aren’t trying!”
• Karen Coyle, Un-uniform Titles. “The Open Library will soon be revealing its first attempt to bring together all of the many published books that represent the same work. It’s been a fascinating exercise; sometimes very satisfying and other times terribly frustrating. If I hadn’t already been convinced that we will need to change our data practices if we want to implement FRBR, this experience would have convinced me.”
• Kelley McGrath, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Summary, and talks about Work records etc. “Do people really judge books by their covers? If not, then why is it that the Penguin version of Passage to India is rated 5 stars while the Penguin Classic version only gets 3?”
• Talet Chaudhri, Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles, Ariadne 58. “The most obvious area of concern is the complexity of the FRBR model. It needs to be made clear whether the model fits the needs of resource delivery on the Web and, if it does, which factors have prevented implementation and how they can be addressed.”
• Open Library bug #338474: Tom Sawyer Detective frbr-ization problem
• Mike Tribby: We will cheerfully implement RDA when LC and a majority of our customers
  adopt it. We will begin planning the changeover when one customer requests
  records done to RDA specifications. One word in my first sentence is a lie.

Alistair Miles sent Initial Release (M1-alpha2) of LOC Data as RDF using RDA and FRBR Schemas to the DC-RDA mailing list yesterday:

Dear all,

I’ve been working on a conversion of the loc marc data from scriblio to rdf using the rda and frbr schemas, and have got as far as I can with the effort I can spare at the moment. I set up a google code project to manage the work at:

[1] http://code4rda.googlecode.com

and have an alpha release of some of the loc data, described further at:

[2] http://code.google.com/p/code4rda/wiki/MilestoneOne

This is still well short of the initial scope proposed at [2] for a first milestone, based on the most prevalent features in the loc dataset, but will nevertheless hopefully serve as an initial proof of principle, and a base from which others can build.

I’ve added diane hillman and ed summers as project owners to [1], I leave it to them to decide best how to take this work forward.

Unfortunately I’m going to be rather busy for the next couple of months, and may not have much time to follow up on this work. However if anyone finds any serious issues in the loc data then do let me know, I’ll do what I can to fix them.

Best wishes,

Alistair

Last week Jodi Schneider and I gave a talk at Code4Lib 2009 in Providence, RI: “What We Talk About When We Talk About FRBR.”

When vendors talk about FRBRization they usually mean grouping manifestations into works. When we talk about FRBR, we mean something far richer and rewarding. What FRBRization algorithms are available and in use now, how well do they work, and how do they present the relationships? We’ll look at the LC FRBR Display Tool, OCLC’s work-set algorithm, LibraryThing’s user-contributed groupings, and VTLS’s system. We’ll discuss their benefits, flaws, and what we need for the future.

In the talk we set out our ideas of weak, strong and complete FRBRization. Weak FRBRization is where we’re mostly at now, with work-set groupings. Strong FRBRization means that all the Group 1 entities (Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item) are handled and their relationships fully described. Complete FRBRization means that all entities and their relationships are fully described and and all of this is described using standard vocabularies and expressed as linked data.

We ended by asking everyone to work on three things over the next year:

1. Demand strong FRBRization.
2. Build linked data.
3. Create the algorithms.

Like all the talks it was recorded and a video will go up soon. I’ll link to it when it does. In the meantime, there are these:

• Slides (2.3 MB PDF)
• My speaking notes (62 KB PDF)

Here are links to the entity-relationship diagrams we used to illustrate weak, strong, and complete FRBRization:

• Weak FRBRization
• (Less weak)
• Strong FRBRization
• (Almost complete FRBRization)
• Complete FRBRization

Jodi and I had never in person until Code4Lib, though we’ve known each other online for quite a while. We put our proposal together in half an hour, chatting in IRC while we edited a Google doc, three hours before the deadline. It all turned out very well and I was delighted to have her as a partner. The conference was great. I’ll be back next year.

Last week I was at Code4Lib 2009 and had a great time. I learned a lot about linked data, among other things — everyone who went is talking about linked data now — and I’ll be posting more about that. Jodi Schneider and I gave a talk and I’ll post the full details next. Until then, a few recent things to check out.

• Alastair Miles’s Code4RDA project page at Google Code. “This is an open source project to develop software for the Resource Description and Access (RDA) library standard. One goal of this work is to provide a bridge between RDA, the DCMI and the W3C Semantic Web Activity.”
• Read the revised and now final Statement of International Cataloguing Principles from IFLA. The English version (103 KB PDF) says “This statement replaces and broadens the scope of 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. It includes not only principles and objectives (i.e., functions of the catalogue), but also guiding rules that should be included in cataloguing codes internationally, as well as guidance on search and retrieval capabilities…. This statement builds on the great cataloguing traditions of the world and also on the conceptual model in the IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).”
• Building a “FRBR-Inspired” Catalog: The Perseus Digital Library Experience (1 MB PDF), by Alison Babeu, from January 2008. I just found out about it last week when I sat beside Alison at Code4Lib 2009. “In the fall of 2005, the Perseus Project experimented with creating a FRBRized catalog for its current online classics collection, a collection that consists of several hundred classical texts in Greek and Latin as well as reference works and scholarly commentaries regarding these works…. Our catalog should not be called a FRBR catalog perhaps, but instead a ‘FRBR Inspired catalog.’ As such our main goal has been “practical findability,” we are seeking to support the four identified user tasks of the FRBR model, or to “Search, Identify, Select, and Obtain,” rather than to create a FRBR catalog, per se.” It’s 87 pages long and very comprehensive. The Perseus Project is a great piece of work.
• John Updike and the Problem of the Original Text. Five expressions of Rabbit, Run.