The FRBR Blog

• Welcome to the Registry, RDA Online users! “This page provides quick links for the Registered RDA Element Sets and Value Vocabularies. Each set of elements or vocabulary concepts has a link to the general description as well as a link to a list of elements or concepts. FRBR Entities for RDA has a note: “Provisional registration of FRBR entities for use in RDA. Official FRBR entity registrations with working URIs will be substituted when available.” If you need an RDA metadata schema I think this is what you want.
• Jenn Riley’s Thoughts on FRSAD. “In short, I think good work has been done here but it doesn’t meet my needs as someone working diligently (and actively implementing FRBR and FRAD) to re-imagine discovery systems in libraries.”
• I posted a link about this before, but Karen Coyle has continued to post her thoughts on Martha Yee’s Can Bibliographic Data Be Put Directly Onto the Semantic Web? See her posts Yee on RDF and Bibliographic Data, and answers to questions 1-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-11, 12-13, with FRBR mentioned in all of them, I think.
• Non-ISBN Matching from LibraryThing’s Thingology blog is about how they do a better job now in their LibraryThing for Libraries service of identifying items that don’t have ISBNs, which, after all, have only been around for 40 years. Anything that helps with this helps with identifying Manifestations, Expressions, and Works.

Catching up after some connectivity problems.

Diane Hillmann posted FRBR vs. FRBR-ization on the blog she does with Jon Phipps:

… In contrast, FRBR-ization only exposes what we can assert based on a mapping from MARC to FRBR (or RDA), which is at best the relationships between the FRBR Group 1 entities: the Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item. With the RDA array of identified relationships, we have a whole lot more. I suppose one could say that these are not necessarily part of the FRBR panoply, but if you consider them the “horizontal” relationships that fill in between the “vertical” relationships that Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item provide, then it’s possible to see how these relationships are enabled by the way the FRBR model has allowed us to rethink our world.

This is one of the issues that makes my head hurt when I think about the RDA “testing” regime that we keep hearing about. Are we wedded to the notion that if it can’t be crammed into MARC we aren’t going to use it? Can’t we start to think about MARC as a fairly lossy output format and move on to something that expresses the relationships we know will help us maintain some important functionality and credibility in the broader data world?

MARC as “a fairly lossy output format.” Preach it.

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly sent out this call for papers. You’ll recall they did a special issue on FRBR in 2004 which you’ve probably already read. Send them more papers about FRBR, FRAD, or FRSAD!

(Edited down slightly from what was sent out.)

/CCQ/ welcomes the submission of research, theory, and practice papers relevant to the broad field of bibliographic organization.

This journal, published now 8 times a year by Taylor & Francis, LLC, is respected as an international forum that emphasizes research and review articles, description of new programs and technologies relevant to cataloging and classification, and considered speculative articles on improved methods of bibliographic control for the future.

Articles are particularly welcome in areas dealing with research-based cataloging practice, including user behavior, user needs and benefits. Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts via email with attached word document to the Editor, Sandra K. Roe, Bibliographic Services Librarian, Illinois State University (email: <skroe@ilstu.edu>).

*_Annual Best Paper Award_* Taylor & Francis sponsors an annual prize for CCQ with a small financial
stipend for the Best Paper of the Year.

*_Complimentary Print Sample_* A free print specimen copy may be obtained by sending an email to Jason McAndrew <jason.mcandrew@taylorandfrancis.com>

*_For More Details_* Further details may be found at the CCQ home page: http://catalogingandclassificationquarterly.com/

New article in Library Resources and Technical Services 53:3 (July 2009): “How the Current Draft of RDA Addresses the Cataloging of Reproductions, Facsimiles, and Microforms,” by Steven A. Knowlton.

Abstract: The cataloging of microforms and other reproductions has been difficult throughout the history of cataloging codes, particularly due to the “multiple versions problem.” The proposed new cataloging code, Resource Description and Access (RDA), seeks to clarify the relationship between reproductions and originals by applying the principles of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) to cataloging. While the use of FRBR principles does help to identify the relationships between works in the catalog, RDA as currently designed is challenging for the cataloger and includes many data that may prove to be difficult for catalog users to understand.

OCLC Exposes Work Identifiers is how OCLC put it on Thursday and I couldn’t put it better.

OCLC has extended the xOCLCNUM API to include the OCLC work identifiers (OWIs) in addition to OCLC record identifiers (OCNs) that correspond to manifestations. For several years now, WorldCat has been organised according to the FRBR model[1] that allows grouping of various editions of publications (e.g. reprints, translations, performances, digitized copies) into works. Sometimes users require particular manifestations and sometimes not, so it is desirable to cater for both needs by allowing navigation from works to manifestations and vice versa.

Here’s the xOCLCNUM API for more.

Quick pointer to Karen Coyle’s blog post Yee on RDF and Bibliographic Data. (That’s Martha Yee.)

The difficulty that I am having at the moment is that it appears to me that there are some fundamental misunderstandings in Yee’s attempt to grapple with an RDF model for library data. In addition, she is trying to work with FRBR and RDA, both of which have some internal consistencies that make a rigorous analysis difficult. (In fact, Yee suggests an improvement to FRBR that I think IFLA should seriously consider, and that is that subject in FRBR should be a relationship, and that the entities in Group 3 should be usable in any relevant situation, not just as subjects. p. 66, #6. After that, maybe they’ll consider my similar suggestion regarding the Group 1 entities.)

Some FRBR and FRAD-related stuff was posted by the Resource Description and Access people that you’ll want to look at.

First, in the Scope and Principles section of the RDA site there are updated mappings from FRBR and FRAD to RDA and back. They go through all of the RDA elements and tell you which FRBR entities, attributes and/or relationships they match. Important stuff.

Second, at RDA Online, which is where the actual commercial online RDA system will be, they’ve posted a new set of entity-relationship diagrams for the FRBR entities that are more visual: look up Manifestation or Concept, for example, and they’ll tell you all of the attributes those entities have, where they come from in FRBR, and what RDA elements those match. These diagrams don’t cover the relationships betweem the different entities, but there’s a placeholder so I expect they’ll come along soon.

Combined, extremely useful stuff for anyone digging into RDA, and also for anyone thinking about FRBR implementations and piggybacking on what RDA is putting in place. RDA will be a commercial product, though, and I worry about that and what effect it will have.