The FRBR Blog

Bram Stoker’s Dracula in FRBR Terms

From Melvin Yabut.

Dunsire on FRBR and RDF

In Re: FRBRer & FRAD in Registry Gordon Dunsire gives a good long answer on the DC-RDA mailing list about how FRBR, RDA and RDF are fitting together and where things are at.

Coyle asks about relations

On RDA-L, Karen Coyle asked a Question about RDA relationships (App. J):

I’m pondering the RDA relationships, as defined in Appendix J. I need clarification …

A relationship is between two “things”. FRBR has lists of Work-Work relationships, Expression-Work relationships, etc. Appendix J lists relationships as either Work, Expression, Manifestation or Item relationships. So…

1) are all relationships in Appendix J between equivalent entities? e.g. are they all Work-Work, Expression-Expression?

2) If not, how can one tell what the two “things” are that are being related?

3) I don’t find some relationships that seem to be key: Expression of; Manifestation of; Item of; Translation of (Expression as translation of Work)

I have other questions, but don’t want to muddy the waters … yet.

Lengthy and informative discussion ensued.

Hammond, Is FRBR the OSI for Web Architecture?

Following up on Does a CrossRef DOI identify a “work?” we have Tony Hammond’s Is FRBR the OSI for Web Architecture?

FRBR is a useful reference model to clarify some of these concepts. But not one that we are overly concerned with at this time. Nor even whether DOI maps one to one onto a given FRBR layer. What we are more concerned with on a pragmatic level is how DOI maps onto the Web architecture and especially how it plays along with Linked Data concepts.

(Aside: A propos FRBR we might be in danger of repeating the OSI mistake for standardizing the network layer model. Ultimately that was maintained as a reference model but dropped as a concrete model in favour of the TCP/IP stack. Could be that FRBR is our OSI and Linked Data is our TCP/IP stack? That is, we might have to settle on the coarser data model in order to get a coherent story out the door where all can agree.)

The OSI model is seven layers that describe networking from the most basic physical level up to protocols used by applications (such as HTTP). IP (Internet Protocol) is at layer three, and TCP (Transport Control Protocol) is at layer four. Together, as TCP/IP, they’re what make the Internet work. There’s a really interesting idea summarized in the penultimate line in my quote, but I don’t know enough about networking to expand on the comparison.

Chaudri et al, Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles

Towards a Toolkit for Implementing Application Profiles, by Talat Chaudhri, Julian Cheal, Richard Jones, Mahendra Mahey and Emma Tonkin, in Ariadne 62 (January 2010). Lots of FRBR throughout.

Dublin Core Application Profiles are intended to be based upon an application model [8], which can be extremely simple. This article concentrates on the recent set of JISC-funded application profiles, which make use of application models based on variants of FRBR [9], and which follow the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles [10]. While application profiles are by no means limited to repositories and can for instance be implemented in such wide-ranging software environments as Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), Virtual Research Environments (VREs) and eAdmin, this paper focusses in the first instance on digital repositories [11]. However, these wider areas are within the broader scope of this study and it is intended that future work will address them more specifically.

Open Knowledge Foundation, “create FRBR model in RDF”

I’m not sure what this is: Ticket #41 (new task): create FRBR model in RDF. Something to do with a project at the Open Knowledge Foundation about works in the public domain?

LeGrow, RDA Is On the Way

Lynne LeGrow posted about a presentation she gave on 18 February: RDA Is On the Way. General overview of what’s going on, with some FRBR, of course, and a Jane Austen example.

Fairly slow this week in FRBRland. Here are some links.

Bilder, Does a CrossRef DOI Identify a Work?

Geoffrey Bilder asked the question Does a CrossRef DOI Identify a Work? (A DOI is a digital object identifier, often something rather cryptic-looking such as 10.1038/nature02999, that identifies an article in Nature). An article in a journal is a work (to be exact: what you hold in your hand, if it’s in print, is an item exemplifying a manifestation of an expression of that work) and if a DOI identified a work then that would be extremely useful. But:

Tony’s recent thread on making DOIs play nicely in a linked data world has raised an issue I’ve meant to discuss here for some time- a lot of the thread is predicated on the idea that CrossRef DOIs are applied at the abstract “work” level. Indeed, that it what it currently says in our guidelines. Unfortunately, this is a case where theory, practice and documentation all diverge.

… CrossRef DOIs should be probably assigned at the expression level and different expressions should be assigned different CrossRef DOIs. This is because assigning a CrossRef DOI at the higher “work” level is generally not granular enough to guarantee that a reader following the citation will see what the author saw when creating the citation. For example, one translation of a work might be substantially different from another translation of the same work.

Ronald Murray lecture at British Library

Ann Chapman’s FRBR Lecture at BL describes the talk that the Library of Congress’s Ronald Murrary gave at the British Library.

So how might this work in practice? Typing in ‘cats’ as a search term in my public library catalogue today brings up 500 results. There is no order to the list, it includes both fiction and non-fiction titles and it doesn’t separate out different forms of resource. I could limit the search to items in my local branch (213 results) or limit it by media – large print, say, which gets me just 7 results – but however I limit I am still faced with an unordered list of adult and junior fiction and non-fiction titles in various media.

Now, if the catalogue had been designed with FRBR principles and a MARC Format enabled for RDA defined data, then my experience would be different. For example, options to limit my search for content type and audience would make it easier to find a book written for adults. Adding in a further limiter for media type means I could restrict the search to large print titles or e-books. Even if I don’t limit in these ways, if the right data is in the record (and the system is designed to do this) the results display could show the items in different groups – all the adult non-fiction text resources first, then junior non-fiction, then junior fiction, then videos, say. Another way would be to start with cats as a search term; the first results display might simply say ‘500 items found’ and ask you to choose limiters (e.g. adult/junior, fiction/non-fiction, text/video/images).

Yáñez, Keepin’ Up

Israel Yáñez noted that he got his library school diploma in the mail (congratulations!) and this is how he celebrated:

Not wanting to be left behind on the FRBR/RDA front, I compiled a collection of handouts I had gathered, during the last year or so, of presentations on the subject by people from whom I want to hear (including my cataloging professor Dr. Robert Ellett).

The collection came out to 92 pages. I sent my order to FedEx Office Printing Online (coil binding and tabs included!). Total cost under twenty bucks. An investment in my continuing development, I figure.

Hi. I usually get this out on Fridays, but I hope you don’t miss it because it’s coming out on Saturday this week. Seems like it was a slowish week in FRBRania. The first couple of pieces involve the RDA-L mailing list archives (RDA being, of course, the new cataloguing rules Resource Description and Access) and also Karen Coyle .

Mix and Match: Mashups of Bibliographic Data

Mix and Match: Mashups of Bibliographic Data at the recent American Library Association conference had people from Google talking about Google Books metadata, OCLC talking about ONIX, and the Open Library talking about the Open Library. Eric Hellman was there and wrote it up in Google Exposes Book Metadata Privates at ALA Forum, which a lot of people have been pointing out, including on RDA-L.

Karen Coyle, who was the Open Library person at the session, brought the four FRBR user tasks into talk about alphabetical ordering of titles:

In FRBR we have the four user tasks: find, identify, select, obtain. These are fully imbued with the assumption of user knowledge.

“to find entities that correspond to the user’s stated search criteria (i.e., to locate either a single entity or a set of entities in a file or database as the result of a search using an attribute or relationship of the entity);”

This seems to eliminate the possibility that the user could be successful in the library catalog with a need like: “I just finished Twilight and loved it. What else might I like?” Yet that is a legitimate query to bring to the library, and even to the library catalog. Perhaps we should spend some time re-writing the FRBR user tasks, expanding them to meet a wider variety of user needs. Then we could look at our catalogs and say: “What does this mean in terms of catalog functionality?” I maintain that alphabetical order will not be at the top of our list, but will probably appear along some user tasks.

Peter Murray was also there, and wrote it up in Mashups of Bibliographic Data: A Report of the ALCTS Midwinter Forum:

[From the OCLC section.] If there is an exact match for the incoming ONIX record in WorldCat, the WorldCat record is enhanced with certain fields from the ONIX record (descriptions, author biographies, web links) — being careful not to override authority work being done by libraries, but adding enhancements that libraries may not otherwise input. In turn, enhancements from exact match record and FRBR work set records (hardcover versus softcover versus audiobook, etc.) are added to the ONIX record (non-English subject headings, adding a Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) field from another similar record if one doesn’t already exist, change the author field to an authority-controlled version). If there is not an exact match for the ONIX record in WorldCat, a new WorldCat record is built from the ONIX record and it is subsequently enhanced by metadata found in the FRBR work set records.

RDA-L thread on RDA and granularity

Coyle began the RDA and Granularity thread prompted by a chat at a libary conference. As you can see from the archives it started a big long discussion that changed Subject. Somewhere in there John Myers posted in the Systems v Cataloging subthread:

[C]onsider the FRBR expression entity. A significant aspect in textual works between expressions is translation. We do have a 240 field to record that, but since the application of the rules for Uniform titles were left to the discretion of the cataloging agency, indication of an expression for a translation can also appear in a translation note recorded in tag 500, sometimes in conjunction with the 240 but oftentimes alone (as several thousand records in my catalog will attest). Now, if this data were consistently recorded in the 240 (both with respect to the format and to the application of use of the 240), then machine FRBR-ization of these records for translations would be relatively simple.

There was more FRBR discussion in the replies.

RDA National Test Update

Jennifer Eustis’s RDA National Test: Update points to Testing Resource Description and Access (RDA) at the Library of Congress, which sketches out how a bunch of libraries are going to test RDA before committing to use it. Because FRBR is fundamental to RDA, this will also be the biggest test so far of how FRBR helps bibliographic organization.

RDA vs. AACR2: Implications for Social Justice

On 11 January the New York City Radical Reference Collective ran RDA vs. AACR2: Implications for Social Justice, with Rick Block from Columbia University.

Jessica Lingel wrote notes on the session, which are worth reading. It looks like there was a good review of FRBR and RDA and where things are at, and then some interesting questions about that and the social justice and progressive side of cataloguing.

Question – what aspects of cataloging relate to issues of social justice?

It’s mostly a matter of subject headings. But even in descriptive cataloging, what gets included, what doesn’t has implications. RDA won’t so much change that, although it raise the question of personal archiving.

I’d never thought about this angle on FRBR and RDA. Very interesting subject. The first thing that strikes me is that in the linked data and Semantic Web approach anyone can say anything about anything. It will be much easier for people to apply their own sets or subsets of terminology to a group of things while still keeping connected with the rest of the universe, and for anyone else who wants to use that vocabulary to mix it in with their own system. This is a big improvement.