Hello there. This is really Last Month in FRBR. Sorry about that. I was on vacation for a week and what with one thing and another I let a couple of extra weeks pass by. Here are some nice things I’ve missed.
ELAG 2010: Workshop on FRBR and Identifiers
One of the workshops at the ELAG 2010 conference was “Discovery Interfaces 2: FRBR and Identifiers,” led by Janifer Gatenby of OCLC:
Resource discovery relies on persistent and well diffused identifiers. Related to discovery is access and rights management and they too rely on persistent identifiers. The aim of the workshop is to discuss the identifiers that relate to resources and their creators and how well they fit the FRBR model. What proactive roles should libraries be playing in relation to identifiers, their maintenance and diffusion?
Many identifiers will be considered. Among those at the work level are the ISTC (International standard text code), OWI (OCLC work identifier), ISWC (Musical works), ISAN (Audio-visual works) and OWI. At the manifestation level there are ISBN, ISSN, ISMN (music) v-ISAN, DOI, Handle, ARK, LC and other national bibliography identifiers and the OCN (OCLC control number). For creators, there is the new draft International standard ISNI and the emergent ORCID (Open Research Contributor Identifier).
Tasks for the workshop will include examining the existing identifier landscape and its completeness, examining the role of identifiers in discovery and in linking data.
Slides are up: Workshop on FRBR and Identifiers (PDF). Confusingly there are no names mentioned anywhere in so I don’t know who did what.
If you’re at all interested in identifiers for Works, Expressions, Manifestations, Persons and other group 2 entities, subjects, and so on, then you should read this. There are 60 slides, with lots of diagrams, and though it may be hard to get the full sense of it all, you’ll get the basics, lots of acronyms that you can pursue on your own if you don’t know them, some good links, some basic facts, some discussion of linked data, and a good sense of the issues. Have a look.
ALCTS FRBR Interest Group met last week
One week ago today the ALCTS FRBR Interest Group met. Jenn Riley, Yin Zhang, and Martha Yee spoke. I hope recordings or slides or notes go up.
OverCat from LibraryThing and TimSpalding
Tim Spalding announced OverCat, “LibraryThing’s new index of 32 million library records, assembled from libraries around the world … [it] combines results into edition-level clusters, so you get one result per edition (rather than pages and pages of the same edition of the same book from different libraries).”
When I first read that I though they were doing Expression-level groupings, which would be fantastic, but it’s Manifestation-level. Which is great but not fantastic. Nevertheless, it’s more good work from LibraryThing. The sad news is that they’ve harvested data from libraries but due to license restrictions they can’t make their aggregate improved data available.
TSIG pre-conference day on RDA
Shaping Tomorrow’s Metadata with RDA was the name of a full-day session held by the Canadian Library Association’s Technical Services Interest Group the day before the CLA’s 2010 annual conference. There’s some general stuff on RDA but also Pat Riva (chair of the FRBR Review Group) and Tom Delsey (who helped write the FRBR spec) speaking about things, and Jennifer Bowen of Rochester talking about the eXtensible Catalog, which will know about FRBR.
Bibliographica
Bibliographica “is an open catalogue of cultural works that grew out of the Public Domain Works project which started in 2005 and is still running today. The Bibliographica software that powers this site is open-source and designed for others to use. Moreover, different bibliographica instances can co-operatively share information. Other significant features include native RDF support, FRBR-like domain model, and wiki-like recording of every change.”
Taylor, FRBR in Practice — Visit Report
FRBR in Practice — Visit Report by Wendy Taylor, asks (and I quote in full, but go there and follow up):
A colleague and I were recently awarded an Ulverscroft/IFLA Best Practice Award to visit the Celia Library for the Visually Impaired in Helsinki to study their implementation of FRBR. We both work for the RNIB National Library Service so were really interested to find out how Celia use FRBR to assign relationships between different accessible formats of the same work. I’ve read lots about FRBR and have attended many presentations but to actually see it being used in practice and have a go myself was a real revelation. Celia produce many of their audio and Braille books in both Finnish and Swedish so the expression entity is particularly useful for them. Here at the RNIB we have can have several different formats (Braille, giant print, audio) all produced potentially from different editions of the same print work so it would be logical for us to have single record for the work with different manifestations attached.
Does anyone else out there use FRBR? I’d love to hear how you find it.
Oliver, FRBR and RDA: Advances in Resource Description
FRBR and RDA: Advances in Resource Description for Multiple Format Resources, by Chris Oliver.
It’s from 2009 but I just heard about it through Resource Shelf.
Weinheimer, New Possibilities in Cooperative Cataloging
New Possibilities in Cooperative Cataloging by James Weinheimer is a blog post made of an e-mail he sent to a mailing list I’d never heard of:
It still has never been shown that the FRBR user tasks have anything that *our users* want, (in fact, the FRBR displays I have seen tend to frighten even me!) although I will agree that FRBR may give librarians and catalogers a few of the tools that they want. So, the “FRBR user tasks” should probably be renamed the “FRBR librarian tasks”. As an example, I have mentioned several times on other lists that FRBR-type views will not help my patrons find much of anything, and I must confess, they don’t help me find anything I want either.