Last Week in FRBR #31
Scherzo in beta
Jenn Riley announced: FRBRized music search system available:
Indiana University is pleased to announce the public (very Beta) release of Scherzo, a music discovery system designed as a testbed of the FRBR conceptual model. The system may be accessed at <http://vfrbr.info/search>. A product of the IMLS-funded Variations/FRBR project, Scherzo is an early proof of concept for what a library catalog built according to FRBR principles might look like. The current released system is most certainly not a finished product; rather it represents an attempt to share in-progress development work with interested individuals. It is (and will continue to be) far from perfect, and the Variations/FRBR project team hopes these very imperfections help to promote community discussion on the utility of the FRBR model and how feasible mechanisms to automatically FRBRize MARC bibliographic and authority records are likely to be. We welcome and intend to participate in public discussion on this system and the issues it raises. In addition, specific feedback may be sent to vfrbr@dlib@indiana.edu
Scherzo currently contains records representing approximately 80,000 sound recordings from the holdings of Indiana University’s renowed William and Gayle Cook Music Library in the Jacobs School of Music. Work on Scherzo to date has focused most heavily on FRBR Work identification from MARC and basic results display in a FRBRized environment. While we have paid some attention to user interface design, it is not our project’s primary concern. The search system currently resides on a test server; while we expect the service to be generally available, please excuse any temporary down time or unexpected restarts.
In the relatively short term, we have a number of planned improvements to the system, including a keyword search, improved Work identification processes, representing more specific roles that Group 2 entities have to Group 1 entities (beyond created by, realized by, and produced by defined in the FRBR reports), and bulk download of the source data powering this system in XML. In the slightly longer term we hope to make the source data available as Linked Data as well.
For more information, you may see detailed specifications for our MARC to FRBR record transformation <http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/vfrbr/projectDoc/metadata/mappings/spring2010/vfrbrSpring2010mappings.shtml>, or the project home page <http://vfrbr.info>.
A few days later Riley announced she’s moving to the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill to be Head of the Carolina Digital Library and Archives. She’s done great work at Indiana and I wish her all the best in her new job, and I hope the FRBR work at Indiana carries on as successfully as before.
Allen, Faceted Classification and FRBR
Bradley P. Allen posted Faceted Classification and FRBR and puts forward this idea:
Starting from Elaine Svenonius’ set-theoretic interpretation of bibliographical records, let’s redefine the Class 1 FRBR entities in the following way:
- An item is a unique physical embodiment of a work (i.e., a singleton set).
- A work is a set of items with the same intellectual content.
- An expression is a set of items with the same realization of intellectual content.
- A manifestation is a set of items with the same production history.
Mailing list discussions
There are a couple of mailing lists threads to note.
- Non- and Partial-FRBR Metadata, on the W3C’s public-lld list
- [RDA-L] Interesting conversations about RDA and FRBR … on RDA, pointing out the previous
Webinar: Don’t Tilt at Windmills, An Active Learning Approach to Teaching FRBR
The ALA is offering a webinar (a word that always strikes me as strange) for people who are going to be teaching others about FRBR: Don’t Tilt at Windmills, An Active Learning Approach to Teaching FRBR.
FRBR first appeared twelve years ago, and although many of its basic concepts are well known, how many of your staff have read and understand the complete text? Do you know that, for example, chapter six explains how to talk about FRBR with library administrators and public service librarians? This presentation will describe in greater detail our active training methods for FRBR. Our novel and effective program engages the entire cataloging staff with an interactive digress.it blog facilitating a group close reading, hands-on simulations with small groups working together with hundreds of strings of different colored yarn, and debriefing to build consensus about how next-gen tools will be implemented. The active process empowers library staff and the observations from the debriefing foreshadow the major issues that will be faced in implementing new tools at a particular library. This training session is aimed at cataloging managers to help empower their staff with new tools, anticipate challenges in implementation, and build team morale.
Surely conceptual models of the bibliographic universe are exciting enough on their own that we don’t need to worry about morale!
Webinar: FRBR as a Foundation for RDA
Here’s another one: FRBR as a Foundation for RDA. It’s presented by Robert Maxwell, author of FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed, which is excellent, so it should be worth it.
Description: This webinar will cover the basics of FRBR, including its development and contents. Participants will leave the webinar with an understanding of the entity-relationship model on which FRBR is based, the FRBR entities and relationships, and the FRBR user tasks. The webinar will then address, through an exploration of RDA itself, how FRBR lies at the foundation of RDA’s structure, and what implications that might have on future database structures for our catalog descriptions.
Weinheimer, FRBR Podcast part two
James Weinheimer’s Cataloging Matters podcast on FRBR finishes: The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: A Personal Journey Part 2.
Denton, review of Implementing FRBR in Libraries
My review of Implementing FRBR in Libraries: Key Issues and Future Directions, by Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba, will appear in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 49 (1) in January 2011. It’s published by Neal-Schuman and they have a page up about it. See also FRBR-Based Systems to Effectively Support User Tasks and Facilitate Information Seeking, the project out of which this book grew.
(C&CQ is published by Taylor & Francis, and SHERPA/RoMEO says they allow preprints to be archived by the author, so I’m able to put it up for public access. My thanks to C&CQ and Jane Schmidt, the book review editor.)