The FRBR Blog

FRBR work-centric, faceted UI demo developer sought

There’s a short-term contract available for someone to hack on a FRBR interface for the Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC), but the deadline is today. Get your name in if you’re interested. (I was away at a conference last week and didn’t do the weekly update. Sorry for the short notice, but you probably already saw this on a mailing list anyway.)

OLAC (Online Audiovisual Catalogers) has been investigating the potential of the FRBR model and a work-centric approach to improve access to moving images for some time. We are looking for someone to make a basic but functional demonstration end-user interface for moving images that is focused on FRBR works and that offers faceted navigation using sample data for 143 moving image works, 210 manifestations, and 297 items. Ideally, this will be developed with open source tools such as MySQL, Solr and Lucene. I have some ideas about what the interface might look like (see link below) and am looking for someone to put up something quick and dirty, but functional and interactive so people can get a better idea of how this might work. This may not turn out to be anything like what would work for a final user interface, but I am hoping that it will make the potential for a FRBR-based, faceted approach clear and make it easier for people to understand the kinds of searching options we want to provide.

OLAC has agreed to fund $1500 to be awarded to the individual(s) who successfully completes this project. More information on and the sample data for this project are available at http://www.olacinc.org/drupal/?q=node/437

If you are interested in taking this project on, please contact me at kelleym@uoregon.edu via email by Friday, October 22 with a list of your qualifications, a suggested timeline, and any other information you think it might be helpful for us to know. We are willing to negotiate on the timetable, but are interested in having a finished product as soon as possible. Please contact me if you have any questions.

Kelley McGrath
kelleym@uoregon.edu

Lindahl, eXtensible Catalog Software Portfolio

At the Access conference in Winnipeg last week I saw David Lindahl of the eXtensible Catalog project give a talk: eXtensible Catalog Software Portfolio. It wasn’t recorded, which is too bad, because he covered some great FRBR work they’re doing.

If you look at the presentation, on slide 14 you’ll see an “XC Schema Record” that describes a Work/Expression/Manifestation: look for the work, expression, manifestation sections of the record on it and the next slide, and notice how they’re using Dublin Core, RDA, and their own vocabulary to describe things.

Slide 19 briefly describes how the FRBRizing works. They take a bunch of MARCXML records, clean them up, and parse and group them.

The source code is available in Google Code. They tagged a release of the Metadata Services Toolkit in March, and haven’t done a release since then, because the code is changing quickly. You can check out the code from the repository yourself and have a look at the current work, though, for example src/java/xc/mst/utils/XcRecordSplitter.java:

private Work buildWork(Element workElement)
{
        if(log.isDebugEnabled())
                log.debug("Creating a new Work element from a work component of the record with ID " + recordId + ".");

        // Create a Work Object for the passed work element
        Work work = new Work();
        work.setFormat(xcSchemaFormat);
        work.setService(service); // Mark the Work as being from no service since it shouldn't be output

        try
        {
                work.setXcWorkId(frbrLevelIdDao.getNextXcIdForFrbrElement(XcIdentifierForFrbrElementDAO.ELEMENT_ID_WORK));

Lovely old Java. If you’re doing FRBRization, now there’s another algorithm for you to look at. Nice work from XC!

Here’s the abstract of the talk:

The eXtensible Catalog Project has developed four open-source software toolkits that enable libraries to build and share their own web- and metadata-focused applications on top of a service-oriented architecture that incorporates Solr in Drupal, a robust metadata management platform, and OAI-PMH and NCIP-compatible tools that interact with legacy library systems in real-time. XC”s Metadata Services Toolkit allows libraries to orchestrate and sequence metadata processing services on large batches of metadata. Libraries can build their own services or choose from our initial set of metadata services that clean up and “FRBRize” MARC metadata. XC software provides an RDA metadata test bed and a Solr-based metadata “navigator.” XC”s user interface platform is the first suite of Drupal modules that treat both web content and library metadata as native Drupal nodes, allowing libraries to build web-applications that interact with metadata from library catalogs and institutional repositories as well as with library web pages. Other currently-available XC toolkits expose legacy ILS metadata, circulation, and patron functionality via web services for III, Voyager and Aleph (to date) using standard protocols (OAI-PMH and NCIP), allowing libraries to easily and regularly extract MARC data from an ILS in valid MARCXML and keep the metadata in their discovery applications “in sync” with source repositories. This presentation will showcase XC”s metadata processing services, the metadata “navigator” and the Drupal user interface platform. The presentation will also describe how libraries and their developers can get started using and contributing to the XC code.

Ross Singer and Open Library

Ross Singer posted this on Twitter on 13 October:

I just wrote an x-identifier type service for Open Library data, see: http://bit.ly/cDqqam http://bit.ly/cCuvLZ http://bit.ly/beqE3X

I’m not sure exactly how he did it, but he loaded Open Library data dumps into a Talis Platform database and then worked some magic on it.

Indiana U V/FRBR project publishes wireframes

Email sent around by Jenn Riley:

Subject: FRBRized cataloging tool designs and explanatory screencasts released

One of the greatest challenges to implementing the FRBR conceptual model (http://www.ifla.org/en/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records) might be creating a cataloging interface that provides for efficient and effective data entry. The V/FRBR project at Indiana University (http://vfrbr.info) has released a set of design wireframes for a FRBRized cataloging interface for musical materials, and screencasts explaining these designs. These may be found online at http://vfrbr.info/projectDoc/metadata/catalogingTool. Comments and/or questions may be directed to vfrbr@dlib.indiana.edu.

If you’re interested in FRBR, also check out our FRBRized discovery interface and downloadable data, also from the V/FRBR site.

There are four screencasts, with narration and everything. Have a look. This is necessary work:

• Creating Manifestation data
• Adding a new Expression to a pre-existing Work
• Adding a new Work and a new Expression
• Adding a new Person

Library Linked Data use case

The W3C’s Library Linked Data Incubator Group wiki is building up a set of use cases so they have real examples of who wants to do what. Jodi Schneider pointed out Use Case: Pode, submitted by the Norwegian Pode Project. Here’s the goal; the details are on the web page.

Goal

This phase of the project consists of two tasks. Described separately:

A1. Presenting the productions of two authors grouped by FRBR entities Work and Expression, enriched with outside information about these authors and links to online fulltext versions of books.

A2: Converting FRBRized bibliographic data to RDF, and enriching these data with links to individual instances in DBpedia, VIAF and Project Gutenberg.

B1. Making an application that allows the enduser to navigate related Dewey categories by labels in several different languages, to browse the library’s collection of multilingual non-fiction documents.

B2. Converting MARC records to RDF. Creating links to Dewey categories with multilingual language labels from http://dewey.info/.

Pisanski and Žumer, Mental Models of the Bibliographic Universe

Jan Pisanski and Maja Žumer have written a pair of articles about user testing the FRBR model. They appear in Journal of Documentation (66: 5) but preprints are available online:

• Mental Models of the Bibliographic Universe, Part 1: Mental Models of Descriptions (PDF, preprint) (DOI: 10.1108/00220411011066781)
• Mental Models of the Bibliographic Universe, Part 2: Comparison Task and Conclusions (PDF, preprint) (DOI: 10.1108/00220411011066772)

Abstract:

Purpose – The paper aims to present the results of the first two tasks of a user study looking into mental models of the bibliographic universe and especially their comparison to the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) conceptual model, which has not yet been user tested.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper employes a combination of techniques for eliciting mental models and consisted of three tasks, two of which, card sorting and concept mapping, are presented herein. Its participants were 30 individuals residing in the general area of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Findings – Cumulative results of concept mapping show a strong resemblance to FRBR. Card sorts did not produce conclusive results. In both tasks, participants paid special attention to the original expression, indicating that a special place for it should be considered.

Research limitations/implications – The study was performed using a relatively small sample of participants living in a geographically limited space using relatively straight-forward examples.

Practical implications – Some solid evidence is provided for adoption of FRBR as the conceptual basis for cataloguing.

Originality/value – This is the first widely published user study of FRBR, applying novel methodological approaches in the field of Library and Information Science.

How can FRBR say it’s based on user needs?

Notice that line above: “This is the first widely published user study of FRBR.”

Gretchen L. Hoffman’s “Meeting Users’ Needs in Cataloging: What is the Right Thing to Do?” (Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 47: 7, October 2009) (DOI: 10.1080/01639370903111999) talks about how user-centred libraries really are regarding cataloguing. Not very, is her answer. “Cataloging must stop just ‘thinking’ about users. It must show specific behaviors that meet users’ needs. Claims that users are the highest principle of cataloging and librarianship are empty, dishonest, and unethical if not supported by behavior that helps users.”

There’s a paragraph about FRBR that highlights something often pointed out now that the FRBR is going into widespread use through RDA:

Yet, cataloging still claims to focus on users and it places itself within LIS’s user-centered paradigm. Standards and other cataloging initiatives claim to focus on users, but are not actually based on an understanding of users’ needs. For example, the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is a “conceptual model of the bibliographic universe.” The developers claim they took “a user-focused approach” in the development of the model. Yet, the chair of the study admits, “It did not involve studies of how actual users approach and make use of bibliographic records.” How can FRBR call itself user-focused when users were not studied? This is significant, because this model is the basis of the new cataloging rules, Resource Description and Access (RDA). In this way, the idea of being user-focused is perpetuated. Cataloging standards claim to focus on users but are not based on an understanding of users’ needs that originates from empirical studies of real users.

Hoffman’s article cited one by Clare Beghtol, “Professional Values and Ethics in Knowledge Organization and Cataloging,” (Journal of Information Ethics 17: 1, Spring 2008) (DOI: 10.3172/JIE.17.1.12) . Beghtol was one of my professors at library school, so I looked it up, and what did I find but a short FRBR reference, which I include here for the sake of completeness:

Cutter enunciated three functions of the catalog in 1904. They have been preserved by a number of international conferences through the last hundred years and have been augmented by the recent adoption of the Functional Requirements of the Bibliographic Record (FRBR) (http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf. Accessed May 27, 2005). Cutter’s three basic functions of the catalog are to allow the library user to identify a known work (e.g., author/title cataloging), to discover an unknown work on a certain topic (e.g., subject headings, thesauri, classification), and to select a particular manifestation of a work from among a number of manifestations held by a library (e.g., bibliographic details and notes). To these basic functions of finding and collocating, FRBR has added the function of allowing an information seeker to find out where to obtain a copy of the work (e.g., through inter-library loan or the Internet). All these functions are implied in the core value of access to information set out by the ethical codes of the three professional bodies noted above.

Data available for download from Indiana U Variations/FRBR project

An email message that Jenn Riley of Indiana University sent out to many mailing lists:

Subject: FRBRized data available for bulk download

The Variations/FRBR [1] project at Indiana University has released bulk downloads of metadata for the sound recordings presented in our Scherzo [2] music discovery system in a FRBRized XML format. The downloadable data includes FRBR Work, Expression, Manifestation, Person, and Corporate Body records, along with the structural and responsibility relationships connecting them. While this is still an incomplete representation of FRBR and FRAD, we hope that the release of this data will aid others that are studying or working with FRBR. This XML data conforms to the “efrbr” set of XML Schemas [3] created for this project. The XML data may be downloaded from http://vfrbr.info/data/1.0/index.shtml, and comments/questions may be directed to vfrbr@dlib.indiana.edu.

One caveat to those who seek to use this data: we plan to continue improving our FRBRization algorithm into the future and have not yet implemented a way to keep entity identifiers consistent between new data loads. Therefore we cannot at this time guarantee the Work with the identifier http://vfrbr.info/work/30001, for example, will have the same identifier in the future. Therefore this data at this time should be considered highly experimental.

Many thanks to the Institute of Museum and Library Services for funding the V/FRBR project.

Also, if you’re interested in FRBR, please do check out our experimental discovery system: . We’re very interested in your feedback!

Jenn

[1] V/FRBR project home page (http://vfrbr.info); FRBR report (http://www.ifla.org/en/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records)

[2] Scherzo (http://vfrbr.info/search)

[3] V/FRBR project XML Schemas (http://vfrbr.info/schemas/1.0/index.shtml)