The FRBR Blog

The 2006 FRBR Challenge ended on 15 March. I think enough time has passed that the excitement has died down and we can consider the Challenge soberly.

Here’s what I said when I announced it:

The challenge is: How well does FRBR handle Middle-Earth?

People are using FRBR, some on a small scale, some on a large scale, some by automating the extraction and matching of works from a set of manifestations, some by having people do the work manually, most by a mix of both. They’re all showing that FRBR works and that it helps users. They’re also turning up some problems, points that need clarification, grey areas, and places where the model falls a bit short and needs something added. That’s to be expected.

Applying FRBR to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and everything else) will test the model and give us some ideas about what’s easy to do and what’s hard to do, what’s clearly explained in FRBR and what needs more detail, what FRBR already handles and where it’s lacking, and how to deal with really complicated situations involving digital copies or multiple works in one work. I really do mean everything else: movies, Sindarin dictionaries, the whole megillah.

The Rules

So here’s what to do: think of something LOTR-related, and, as best you can, describe it as a work, expression, manifestation, and item, and, if you can, explain a relationship it has to a book Tolkien wrote or something inspired by Tolkien’s work. That’s all. Use official FRBR terminology if you want, but you don’t have to. If you can’t think of what the expression is, or the work, just say so and maybe someone else will have a stab at it.

Response from readers was better than I’d hoped for: four people submitted entries and they all won a prize. You’re sorry now you didn’t enter, aren’t you? But you can try next year.

The Entries

I’ll leave out most of the details here and just concentrate on the works.

• Work: The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien
  • Expression: The Annotated Hobbit, or There and Back Again, a revised and expanded edition annotated by Douglas A. Anderson.
• Work: The Fellowship of the Ring
  • Expression: Either Tolkien’s original text or his revised text
    • Manifestation: Unwin Paperback’s second edition (unknown reprinting) of 1966 (ISBN 004823155X)
  • Expression: 1993? text edited by Douglas A. Anderson
    • Manifestation: Harper Collins, ISBN 007123825
    • Manifestation: Collins Modern Classics, ISBN 00712970X
• Work: The Fellowship of the Ring, a game from Iron Crown Enterprises.
• Work: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001 movie directed by Peter Jackson
• Work: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard Glass Goblet (from Burger King in 2001)
• Work: A Guide to Middle-Earth by Robert Foster
  • Expression: Author’s edited text, 1971
• Work: The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth: From The Hobbit to The Silmarillion, by Robert Foster
  • Expression: Author’s edited text, 1978 (substantially revised version of the above, enough to make it count as a new work)
• Work: A clip-on costume Gandalf beard.
• Work: Nightfall in Middle-Earth by Blind Guardian (a German power metal band), based on The Silmarillion
• Work: The Return of the King, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
  • Expression: Tolkien’s abridgement (unknown date), read by Tolkien himself
• Work: The Atlas of Middle-Earth, by Karen Wynn Fonstad
• Work: Quenya Course by H.K. Fauskanger
• Work: Bored of the Rings, by Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney

The Relationships

Here’s how all the works are related. The names of the relationships are drawn from section 5 of FRBR Final Report. (I didn’t get into what Ian Davis and Richard Newman defined in their RDR specification of FRBR.)

• The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings: has successor?
• The Lord of the Rings to The Silmarillion: has successor?
• The Hobbit to The Silmarillion: has successor?
• The Lord of the Rings to The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers, The Return of the King: has parts
• The Lord of the Rings and The Fellowship of the Ring to The Fellowship of the Ring (game, which involves more than just the events of that one book): has transformation
• The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers to The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson’s movie, which ends with the start of the second book): has transformation?
• The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson’s movie) to the Burger King goblet: ? (has commercial tie-in)
• The Lord of the Rings to a clip-on costume Gandalf beard: ? (has commercial tie-in)
• Nightfall in Middle Earth to The Silmarillion: is complement (autonomous musical work)
• A Guide to Middle Earth to The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit: is supplement (referential work)
• The Complete Guide to Middle Earth to The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit: is supplement (referential work)
• A Guide to Middle Earth to The Complete Guide to Middle Earth: has successor
• The Atlas of Middle Earth to The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit: is supplement (referential work)
• Bored of the Rings to The Lord of the Rings: is imitation (parody)

So, what does that tell us? The entities (work, expression, manifestation, item) are clear enough. What struck me is the difficulty of defining all the relations. Those relations are important. Users will want to know them when they’re searching and browsing.

I’m not sure of the proper term to describe how Tolkien’s books (The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, etc.) all relate. It is not clear how to express the relation of a work to its commercial tie-ins. “Has transformation” covers a vast range of possibilities and would need to be further defined. The list of relations in the Final Report is just a start, I think. If FRBR is to go into widespread use, we’ll want a way to standardize, or at least share, what we call all those relations. Same for work-to-expression relations, expression-to-expression, expression-to-manifestation, and so on, including the relations to people and subjects.

We need to consider both end users and the metadata people when we think about the relations. The metadata people will want a lot of granularity and precision. End users may not — by default a display probably wouldn’t show them a lot of detail, but they might want to see more. How much detail is good? How could the data be stored? How could it be shared? How much can we pull out of, or infer, from existing MARC records?

Conclusion

FRBR is well up to the challenge of mapping out the complicated bibliographic universe that is Middle-Earth. There are some points that need clarification or definition. If Tolkien’s complete writings were FRBRized there would be a lot more questions, probably including many about the expression level. (There’s a working group taking a closer look at expressions, but I have no idea when it will publish something.)

I propose a full-scale test of FRBR by FRBRizing the complete Middle-Earth works of J.R.R. Tolkien, or, for an easier test, FRBRizing the complete works of J.K. Rowling. Rowling’s works are sufficiently well-known and well-documented, even the translations, that it would be a reasonable class project or master’s thesis.

Four people did the hard work of FRBRizing things related to The Lord of the Rings so we could see how well FRBR handles a large, complicated, interrelated set of things one might find in a library. Thanks to all of them! I randomly selected winners, and they are:

• FIRST PRIZE: Kelly Brown wins a Nancy Pearl Librarian Action Figure, a copy of Out On the Rim by Ross Thomas (40 KB PDF), and an S.R. Ranganathan button.
• SECOND PRIZE: Everett Meadors wins a copy of Gone, No Forwarding by Joe Gores and a Ranganathan button.
• THIRD PRIZE: Sarah Elliott wins a Ranganathan button.
• HONOURABLE MENTION: Jennifer Greig also wins a Ranganathan button!

Winners, please e-mail me your postal addresses and I’ll get your prizes in the mail soon. Play with your dolls, read your books, and wear your pins with honour. I’ll summarize the entries and the challenges they pose to FRBR in an entry later this week.

Who knows what the 2007 FRBR Challenge will bring? If there is one. Who knows what 2007 will bring?

Entries are flooding in and I now have two! Remember, there are three prizes that will be randomly awarded (look back at earlier posts for the details), so if one more of the 6.5 billion people on the planet enters, he or she will also be guaranteed a prize.

In the meantime, please contemplate the complexity of FRBRizing the four-DVD set of the special edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), directed by Peter Jackson. Here’s a review of it that lists the contents. Included are:

• The movie itself, split over two DVDs. There are four commentary tracks.
• Disc 3: Short documentaries and things about preparation for the movie: “J.R.R. Tolkien–Creator of Middle-Earth,” “From Book to Script,” “Storyboards and Pre-Viz: Making Words Into Images,” “Designing Middle-Earth,” “Weta Workshop,” “Costume Design,” “Early Storyboard Sequence: The Prologue,” “Abandoned Storyboard Sequence: Orc Pursuit Into Lothlorien,” “Abandoned Storyboard Sequence: Sarn Gebir Rapids Chase,” “Pre-Viz Animatic: Gandalf Rides to Orthanc,” “Pre-Viz Animatic: The Stairs of Khazad-dum,” “Storyboard to Film Comparison: Nazgul Attack at Bree,” “Pre-Viz to Film Comparison: The Bridge of Khazad-dum,” “Bag End Set Test,” “Middle-Earth Atlas” (an interactive map), “New Zealand as Middle-Earth.”
• Disc 4: Even more documentaries and things, about the making of the movie and after. I won’t list everything.

How would one specify all the works, expressions, and manifestations involved here? All the relationships? Take an unused storyboard sequence (a storyboard being a series of sketches showing how something will be filmed and how it will look on screen). People took the screenplay and made storyboards, including a sequence about Orcs chasing people into Lothlorien. The sequence is a series of drawings on paper. The drawings were digitized and reproductions of the digitizations stored on DVD. They are on a DVD containing many other related short documentaries and maps and things, and that DVD is one of a set of four in a box. The sequence didn’t make it into the movie, so it’s different from the storyboard sequences that were filmed and used. That’s a lot of different kinds of entities, lots of relationships, and a lot of confusion from looking at a complicated aggregate and not having any rules to follow. I hope the aggregates working group will eventually help with this kind of thing.

A good question for a cataloguing course’s final exam would be to show the contents of a special edition DVD like this and ask students to sketch out as many entities and relationships as they can.

The 2006 FRBR Challenge closes tomorrow at 23:59:59 Eastern Standard Time, and since there are three prizes and only one entrant so far, you stand a good chance of winning a prize. In the meantime, here’s another example:

• Work: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the 2001 movie directed by Peter Jackson movie.
• Expression: The original theatrical 178 minute release, with Spanish subtitles.
• Manifestation: The 2002 video cassette release from New Line Home Entertainment.
• Item: The copy owned by the Parliament branch of the Toronto Public Library.
• Relations: As a work, it’s related to Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, and also to The Two Towers because I think some events from the start of that book are moved into this movie. It has sequels, of course: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). There are two sets of expressions of the movie, I think: the ones based on the original theatrical release and the ones based on the 208-minute special extended edition. The DVD special editions make a very complicated FRBR set because of all of the extras and commentaries and costume design sketches and such. The movie’s musical score was released separately, and formed part of a symphony, and there are lots of other relations that could be listed, including the movie tie-in edition of the book mentioned in the last post.

FRBRily, what are the differences between the movie on video with Spanish subtitles and the movie on DVD with optional Spanish subtitles? With the audio option turned so that the Spanish dubbed audio track plays?

It’s not too late to enter. Leave your entry in a comment!

Two manifestations of identical works and expressions. I go into a lot of detail, but you don’t have to. I got intrigued by all works and relationships involved here. Sketch out a work, expression, manifestation, and item to whatever level of detail you want, and leave your entry in a comment!

• Work: The Fellowship of the Ring
• Expression: 1993? text edited by Douglas A. Anderson.
• Manifestation 1: Verso of title page says it’s the first edition of the 1999 US mass-market paperback from HarperCollins, ISBN 007123825. However, it’s a tie-in to the 2001 movie The Fellowship of the Ring, the cover has a still image from the movie, and the back cover says “Photo © 2001 New Line Productions Inc.” Perhaps they printed up new copies from the 1999 plates and put new covers on them without updating the t.p. verso.
  • Item: Copy owned by the North York Central branch of the Toronto Public Library.
• Manifestation 2: 2001 British trade paperback edition from Collins Modern Classics, ISBN 00712970X, with cover illustration by John Howe.
  • Item: Copy owned by the North York Central branch of the Toronto Public Library.

Relations:

• Tolkien’s work The Fellowship of the Ring is related to the work that dramatizes it, the 2001 movie The Fellowship of the Ring. Manifestation 1 has another, narrower, relationship to the movie work because it’s a tie-in edition.
• John Howe’s painting is a work, a referential complement to Tolkien’s Fellowship. The FRBR Report says, “The third relationship type, complement, involves works that are intended to be combined with or inserted into the related work. In other words, they are intended to be integrated in some way with the other work, but were not part of the original conception of that prior work. As with successors and supplements, some complements can be used or understood on their own without reference to another work (i.e., they are autonomous), others require an understanding of another work (i.e., they are referential).” A manifestation of this work is part of Manifestation 1.
• Things get even more complicated because both manifestations here contain the revised 1993 expression of Douglas A. Anderson’s essay, “Note on the Text.” (Anderson is a Tolkien bibliographer and helped Wayne G. Hammond with J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography (1993).) The essay here explains the history of the text of the book, Tolkien’s corrections over the years, American editions, typographical errors introduced in reprints, etc. Not only is the text of Fellowship here revised (“this new edition makes a significant stride towards such perfection”) but Anderson’s essay is a revision and correction of an earlier version (“This revison of the ‘Note on the Text’, undertaken for a new reset edition of The Lord of the Rings (to be published in various formats), replaces and supersedes the earlier version”).
• Both manifestations say “This reset edition contains newly drawn maps by Stephen Raw, based on Christopher Tolkien’s original maps.” The originals appeared in the original manifestations of The Lord of the Rings but reproduced poorly, so Raw “has therefore redrawn them all, very closely following the originals.” The maps here would be, I think, manifestations of a new expression of a work that is a referential complement to LOTR.

The level of detail to be stored and shown to users would depend on who they are. Tolkien bibliographers have far more demanding bibliographic needs than someone who just wants to start reading LOTR.

There is now one official entry, from Jennifer Greig! The contest runs until next Wednesday so there’s lots of time to enter. Remember, there are prizes. See the original FRBR Challenge post for the details and Greig’s nice FRBRization of an atlas of Middle-Earth.

Here’s another example from me:

• Work: The Return of the King, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
• Expression: Tolkien’s abridgement (unknown date), read by Tolkien himself.
• Manifestation: Included in The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection, a four-cassette collection from Caedmon (ISBN 155994675X), c1992.
• Item: The copy owned by the Maryvale branch of the Toronto Public Library, call number FICTION TOL.
• Relations: The abridgement is a new expression the original work, not a new work in itself. The abridgement is in fact a new expression based on another expression, Tolkien’s original text (or perhaps his revised text, though I don’t suppose it would matter). The expression was read aloud by Tolkien and manifested in the recording stored on cassette. It may also be manifested in print, but I don’t know.

Things get a bit more complicated because this recording is one of several on The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection, which also includes readings of adbridgements of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and some poems and songs and other things, some read by Tolkien’s son Christopher. Is this work part of that larger work, or is it just this manifestation that’s part of something larger? Hmm.

Further musings: In a FRBR-aware catalogue, I imagine that when looking at any work I would see a link to a list of all audiobook versions, or indeed perhaps all audio versions, including dramatizations. This reading would be on a list along with any unabridged recordings and perhaps the relevant parts of the BBC’s radio dramatization. Looking at the other recordings in this Caedmon collection would lead me up to their works and to the trilogy as a whole.

Another example of the FRBRization of something in the Lord of the Rings bibliographic universe: a game.

• Work: The Fellowship of the Ring, a game from Iron Crown Enterprises.
• Expression: The original version of the game.
• Manifestation: The original 1983 boxed set including a map, cards, counters, instructions, etc. “Stock #FR-7100.”
• Item: My copy, which I’ve owned for over twenty years and never played.
• Relations: “The Fellowship of the Ring (FOTR) is a game based upon J.R.R. Tolkien’s three-volume epic, The Lord of the Rings, with the focus on the action in the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring.” So an inspired-by relation to the trilogy as a whole and a special one to the first book.

There has been less than one entry in the 2006 FRBR Challenge. Here’s another example of something Lord of the Rings-related, something one might find in a library, this time music:

• Work: Nightfall in Middle-Earth by Blind Guardian (a German power metal band).
• Expression: The original 1998 release (I believe there was a later release with two bonus tracks).
• Manifestation: The 1998 compact disc pressing from Century Media, number 7961-2 (it could be a repressing; I don’t know).
• Item: My copy.
• Relations: This CD is inspired by The Silmarillion. It contains twenty-two works, each inspired by a particular incidents or stories from The Silmarillion. There are eleven songs and eleven interludes, the first with Sauron taking his leave from Morgoth. This CD has a whole-part relation to each of the twenty-two tracks, and each of those has its own relations to The Silmarillion.

I’ll have some more examples of my own to post next week. In the meantime I hope you’re thinking of some Lord of the Rings-related thing to describe with a work, an expression, a manifestation, and an item. Fame and possibly a button with the face of S.R. Ranganathan await you.

Today is the start of the first contest here at the FRBR Blog: the 2006 FRBR Challenge. The challenge is: How well does FRBR handle Middle-Earth?

People are using FRBR, some on a small scale, some on a large scale, some by automating the extraction and matching of works from a set of manifestations, some by having people do the work manually, most by a mix of both. They’re all showing that FRBR works and that it helps users. They’re also turning up some problems, points that need clarification, grey areas, and places where the model falls a bit short and needs something added. That’s to be expected.

Applying FRBR to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and everything else) will test the model and give us some ideas about what’s easy to do and what’s hard to do, what’s clearly explained in FRBR and what needs more detail, what FRBR already handles and where it’s lacking, and how to deal with really complicated situations involving digital copies or multiple works in one work. I really do mean everything else: movies, Sindarin dictionaries, the whole megillah.

The Rules

So here’s what to do: think of something LOTR-related, and, as best you can, describe it as a work, expression, manifestation, and item, and, if you can, explain a relationship it has to a book Tolkien wrote or something inspired by Tolkien’s work. That’s all. Use official FRBR terminology if you want, but you don’t have to. If you can’t think of what the expression is, or the work, just say so and maybe someone else will have a stab at it.

The challenge closes in two weeks, at the end of Wednesday 15 March 2006.

Prizes

Anyone who enters is eligible for a prize. First prize is a Nancy Pearl Librarian Action Figure and a copy of Out On the Rim, by Ross Thomas (40 KB PDF). Second prize is a copy of Gone, No Forwarding by Joe Gores. Both the first- and second-prize winners also get one of these S.R. Ranganathan buttons, and third prize is just a button. I’ll pick at random from everyone who suggests something.

How to Enter

Add a comment to this post, or any post until the contest closes. When you submit a comment it won’t show up right away, because I need to approve them by hand (to prevent spammers from clogging things up). I’ll approve it as soon as I can. You can also e-mail me your entry, and I’ll post it.

Examples

Here’s an example:

• Work: The Fellowship of the Ring.
• Expression: I don’t know if this is Tolkien’s original text or the revised text (see Wikipedia for a brief explanation).
• Manifestation: Unwin Paperback’s second edition (unknown reprinting) of 1966 (ISBN 004823155X).
• Item: My copy, the one I’ve had since I first read the series in grade six.
• Relationships? It’s part of The Lord of the Rings, of course.

Here’s another:

• Work: The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth: From The Hobbit to The Silmarillion, by Robert Foster.
• Epxression: Revised 1978 text.
• Manifestation: First paperback edition, published by Del Rey (ISBN 0345279751).
• Item: My copy.
• Relationships? This is a detailed index to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, explaining all the characters and places and events and listing where they occur in the texts. It cites two different editions of The Hobbit, other Tolkien works, and some secondary sources.

Here’s a third, somewhat less thorough:

• Work: A clip-on costume Gandalf beard.
• Expression: I have no idea at all.
• Manifestation: I don’t remember any details; I just saw it in a store once and didn’t write down the details.
• Item: The one I saw in the store.
• Relationships? Well, it’s inspired by the books or the movies. The precise term for the relationship between a book and a clip-on beard escapes me.

Things to Consider

My Unwin paperback of The Fellowship of the Ring isn’t too hard to describe using FRBR. The bibliographic universe of Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations will probably be very difficult: think of all the different releases and the DVD versions with lots of extras and documentaries and commentary tracks, all packaged differently, in different languages, all over the world. Other things to ponder:

• Is The Lord of the Rings a work made up of three smaller works? What about the appendices at the end of Return of the King — is each a work of its own? How many works are contained in a one-volume edition of LOTR? I believe Tolkien considered it all one novel.
• The Silmarillion and all those other books edited by Christopher Tolkien. That’s a complicated publishing history.
• The Lord of the Rings, the musical, opening in Toronto later this month
• The Ralph Bakshi movie.
• Rush’s Rivendell, Led Zeppelin’s The Battle of Evermore, and hundreds of other works of music inspired by LOTR, including a lot of progressive rock and heavy metal.
• The Very Secret Diary of Boromir of Gondor at LiveJournal.
• Translations.

Background Reading and Sources of Ideas

• Wikipedia on: The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings in pop culture, Bored of the Rings, The Two Towers: The Purist Edit
• Search for "the lord of the rings" at the spiffy North Carolina State catalogue
• Search for "lord of the rings" at LibraryThing
• The Fellowship of the Ring in OpenWorldCat (look at the Editions tab to see other manifestations)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Tale of a Text
• An Illustrated Tolkien Bibliography
• The BBC Radio adaptation, for sale as a boxed set of CDs
• Völuspá (check the names of the dwarves)

Reference

• What is FRBR?, by Barbara Tillett (2.8 MB PDF)
• Group 1 Relationships and More Relationships Between Groups, both earlier posts here
• Expression of Core FRBR Concepts in RDF and Expression of Extended FRBR Concepts in RDF, by Davis and Newman

Let the challenge begin! Leave your entry in a comment.