The FRBR Blog

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.