The FRBR Blog

Catching up on something from last month: Sharing Standards for Bibliographic Data Worldwide: An Overview of Changes in Cataloguing Practices, a talk by Barbara Tillett at the Atlantic Provinces Library Association Conference 2009 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Built on foundations established by the Anglo-American CataloguingRules (AACR), RDA (Resouce Description and Access) will provide a comprehensive set of guidelines and instructions on resource description and access covering all types of content and media. The new standard is being developed for use primarily in libraries, but consultations are being undertaken with othercommunities (archives, museums, publishers, etc.) in an effort to attain an effective level of alignment between RDA and the metadata standards used in those communities, increasing the ability to share metadata among diverse communities. Cataloguers aren’t the only professionals who will be affected by these new rules. Increasing the ability to share metadata outside of our own organizations and changing description and access rules will impact the entire information profession. Along with providing an overview of RDA and its underlying conceptual model (FRBR- Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), examples of how FRBR can benefit circulation, reference and serials will be explored.

Laurel Tarulli says it was a very good talk:

Not only did she explain RDA and FRBR in a way that made complete sense (and I’ve been to other RDA sessions), but she also touched on how this is something the entire profession needs to be paying attention to, not just cataloguers. This is interesting because, up until now, many librarians have brushed it aside as a cataloguing issue. Not so! How information is retrieved, what it will retrieve and how it is presented will all change. The relationship gathering is what really excites me. And, it should excite all librarians in and out of the cataloguing department.

Seen on David Bigwood’s Catalogablog, quoting something else:

IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR)

Invitation to participate:

Review of “Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) — Draft Report” Available through: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/index.html or directly from: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/report090623.pdf (2,800 kb)

Comments deadline: July 31, 2009

FRSAD is the new name for FRSAR, just as FRAD started as FRANAR, Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records. Which you can now hold in your hands, because Functional Requirements for Authority Data is finished and now in book form.

This book represents one portion of the extension and expansion of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. FRBR has been published as Nr 19 in the present Series. It contains a further analysis of attributes of various entities that are the centre of focus for authority data (persons, families, corporate bodies, works, expressions, manifestations, items, concepts, objects, events, and places), the name by which these entities are known, and the controlled access points created by cataloguers for them. The conceptual model describes the attributes of these entities and the relationships between them.

It costs €69.95 or USD $84 for North Americans.

There are no links on IFLA’s site to a downloadable FRAD, and there’s no mention of the FRSAD draft. The FRSAD group is hosting the draft on their own web site. Neither group announced their news on the FRBR mailing list. I’m bewildered. I assume the final FRAD text will be available to download soon. Open access to FRBR was a major contributor to its success.

I’ve been wondering when Google would go at FRBR. Dan Cohen, one of the people behind Zotero, is at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference and he’s covering it on Twitter. He was just at a talk given by Jon Orwant, the Perl guru who now works on Google Books.

• There are 120M works & 165M manifestations of works worldwide in FRBR terms according to Google. #dh09
• For those not hip to FRBR: “What is FRBR?” from Library of Congress: http://is.gd/1dgeQ #dh09
• @Musebrarian says he would be interested in how they are interpreting “works” and “manifestations.”
• @Musebrarian Orwant says they don’t do ultrastrict FRBR, but it’s close. But the numbers seem off to me; could use more explanation.

A FRBRy one-day preconference before the 2009 American Library Association conference is scheduled. Description taken from this PDF:

RDA, FRBR, and FRAD: Making the Connection

Friday, July 10, 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

This pre-conference concentrates on the role of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) in Resource Description and Access (RDA). The necessity of understanding these new conceptual foundations is key to the transition to the future cataloging environment. Participants will hear from a panel of experts on FRBR and FRAD attributes and relationships, new terminology and concepts, and participate in practical hands-on exercises.

Speakers: Barbara Tillett, Chief, Cataloging Policy and Support Office, Library of Congress; Robert Maxwell, Metadata & Special Collection Cataloging Dept Chair, Brigham Young University; Tom Delsey, RDA Editor, JSC; Glenn Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management, OCLC

Tickets: Advance: ALA Member, $249;

ALCTS Division/RT Member, $199; Non-Member, $289; Student, $99

Onsite: ALA Member, $299; ALCTS Division/RT Member, $249; Non-Member, $339; Student, $99

Event Code: AS4

Via e-mail John F. Myers sent to AUTOCAT. Sounds like there’ll be a lot of RDA on the agenda at the ALA.

E-mail announcement from Nathalie Schulz sent to the rda-l mailing list:

News from the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA:

• Finalization of RDA text: The RDA text was handed to the co-publishers on schedule on 22 June. RDA is scheduled to be released at the end of November 2009.
• New Chair: Alan Danskin will be the JSC Chair from 1 July 2009. Danskin is the Metadata and Bibliographic Standards Coordinator at the British Library.
• During July, the JSC Secretariat will move to the British Library: jscsecretary@bl.uk
• Web site: The JSC Web site has moved to http://www.rda-jsc.org/. There are redirections in place from the old site to pages on the new site explaining the change.

I haven’t been keeping up with everything about Resource Description and Access, the new cataloguing rules, because there’s an awful lot going on and I find it a bit confusing. When it’s done and released then we can, I hope, all see how it implements FRBR and how we can use it. I think access will be by subscription only, though. Perhaps things like the RDF schemas, which will be public, will be enough.

The main announcement about this is a PDF (!?) so I’ll quote first from a news announcement from The DOI System (that’s Digital Object Identifiers) that has some links:

A new initiative, the Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF), has been announced by a consortium of partners. This will create an extensive and authoritative mapping of vocabularies from nine major content metadata standards, creating a downloadable tool to support interoperability across communities. The mapping will also be extensible to other standards. The work builds on the principles of interoperability established in the indecs Content Model, and is an expansion of the existing RDA/ONIX Framework into a comprehensive vocabulary of resource relators and categories, which will be a superset of those used in major standards from the publisher/producer, education and bibliographic/heritage communities.

The International DOI Foundation, which fully endorses this work, will provide a web hosting facility for the Framework as part of its commitment to promoting the wider use of interoperable metadata, and will use the vocabulary mapping wherever possible to support the association of metadata with DOI names.

For further information see:

• VMF project announcement, June 15, 2009.
• indecs Content Model
• RDA/ONIX Framework for resource categorization

The actual announcement begins:

Work is under way to create an extensive and authoritative mapping of vocabularies from major content metadata standards, creating a downloadable tool to support interoperability across communities.

The work is an expansion of the existing RDA/ONIX Framework into a comprehensive vocabulary of resource relators and categories, which will be a superset of those used in major standards from the publisher/producer, education and bibliographic/heritage communities (CIDOC CRM; DCMI; DDEX; DOI; FRBR; MARC21; LOM; ONIX; RDA – see reference section below for details).

The resulting tool will be known as the Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF).

Michalis Sfakakis and Sarantos Kapidakis, Eliminating Query Failures in a Work-Centric Library Meta-Search Environment, Library Hi Tech 27:2 (DOI: 10.1108/07378830910968236).

Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to describe how approaches such as semantic based query rewritings and FRBR work entities composition could solve existing problems and improve the overall behavior of a mediated based meta-search environment. Moreover, it aims to present meta-Composer, which is a meta-search engine without query failures that composes work level entities for display, as well as an autonomous open service for discovering substitutions of unsupported access points, in the context of the Z39.50 environment.

OCLC’s Xiaoming Liu has added some new features to their xID services, of which xISBN is probably the most familiar. xISSN and xOCLCNUM both support some new information. Check his blog post for links to the API, etc.

Mail sent from Rice Majors to AUTOCAT:

The next meeting of the ALCTS FRBR Interest Group will be at ALA Annual in Chicago on Friday, July 10, from 10:30 am to 12:00 pm, in the Chicago Hilton. The room assignment is Northwest 1.

If you would like to give a presentation or otherwise speak at the meeting, please do send me a note to let me know what you’ll be covering and how long you’ll need. Also on the agenda will be the election of a vice-chair/chair elect for this interest group. Finally, we’ll also plan to include a discussion time during the meeting for a less formal conversation about FRBR testing, workflow, implementations, and questions.

I’ve never been but from the looks of it you should check it out if you read this blog and you’re at the ALA. Some background:

• Description of FRBR Interest Group meeting at ALA Midwinter in January 2009
• Galen Charlton’s notes on the 2008 ALA meeting

• Resource Description and Access (RDA) and New Research Potentials (728 KB PDF), by Shawne D. Miksa, from the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 35: 5, June/July 2009. “The prospect of the relearning of library cataloging by catalogers and the re-engineering of bibliographic control systems is daunting, but we should also consider some of the areas of potential new research that may present themselves as a result of RDA, FRBR, and FRAD.”
• RDA testing sites were announced, and among many others Diane Hillmann commented on it and that her application was turned down. “Much more interesting, to me anyway, is the idea of what RDA records might look like in straight XML or RDF, without the necessity of the contortions involved in making it all ‘fit’ into a MARC system. Without the layer of MARC contortion we might really be able to figure out whether catalogers could adjust to RDA and create FRBR-based records.”
• Helpful Links on RDA, FRBR, and FRAD from the MARS Authority Control blog.
• I mentioned From Rules to Entities: Cataloguing with RDA, a one-day session on 29 May 2009, before the Canadian Library Association conference, last week. The video part of the webcast wasn’t working, but I was told it had been recorded in the room on other cameras, and those videos will go up online soon. I’ll post a link when they do. It was quite an informative day, I heard.