The FRBR Blog

I gave a talk yesterday at the 2008 Ontario Library Association Conference called FRBR: Who’s Using It and What Can I Expect Next?. It’s a general overview: a bit about what FRBR is, a bit about what’s going on with RDA and the WoGroFuBiCo, some examples (xISBN, thingISBN, AustLit), a few things to keep an eye on, and a few things I think will happen over the next year or two. I recorded it on my little MP3 player and there is a low quality MP3 recording (1 hour, 14 MB) available to go with it. (I have the original WAV file if any audio expert would care to clean it up.)

I encourage any of you who speak about FRBR to record your talks. Post them on the web and I’ll link to them! Or, if you don’t want to or can’t do the audio but can put up your slides, include the speaking notes too.

Hello. Happy new year. I hope 2008 is a good one for you. Who knows what will happen with FRBR over the next twelve months? We know there will be reports written, conference presentations given, blog entries posted, implementations written or improved, user tests made, heated words exchanged, and I think the amount of attention paid to FRBR will increase, as it did in 2007 over 2006. I’ll keep on pointing out what I see. As always, if you’re doing anything FRBR-related and want to get the word out, let me know. It will be an interesting year in bibliographic control. Don’t bet against anyone who says things won’t get freakier.

Last November you may have seen mention on some blogs of Francis Miksa’s guest lecture at the library school at Shampoo-Banana. It was given on 6 March 2006 and was called The Genius of Library Cataloging and its Possible Future (RealAudio).

I converted it into an MP3 (using the same Unix commands as when I did the same for the WoGroFuBiCo release) but didn’t get around to listening to it until last week. I highly recommend it, especially in light of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control report, which will be made final in a week or two. Francis Miksa is a major figure in the field, and I highly recommend his book Charles Ammi Cutter: Library Systematizer. Miksa talks about Cutter in his lecture, and much else, giving a personal survey of the history of cataloguing and its future.

As Christine Schwartz pointed out, “last 40 minutes or so deal with Dr. Miksa’s vision for a cataloging future,” so don’t tune out early. Really, this is worth a listen.

UPDATE: I forgot to point out that Miksa mentions FRBR several times in his talk. He stresses the importance of relationships between things, and how useful they are to users. At one point he questions whether FRBR is good enough at this, or if it’s dealt with enough in the Final Report. The relationships between the entities are of great interest to lots of people working on or thinking about FRBR, so he should have no worries there. Work, expression, manifestation, item are the four most commonly used words when talking about FRBR, but how a work and an expression are related, or how two manifestations relate, or how a person is the subject of a work and how the person is related to a group — such things are all very important and are what will make FRBR so useful, I think. Personally, I’m in favour of letting users decide what relationships they want, and in giving them tools to do so.

Also, I think I got mixed up with too many negatives when I said you shouldn’t bet against anyone who thinks bibliographic control won’t get freakier. I can’t even parse that. Let me simplify: bibliographic control will get freakier in 2008. Everything will.

Aaron Swartz was at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School on Tuesday and gave a talk about what the Open Library is doing and how it’s going. David Weinberger was there and blogged it. If you listen to the audio recording of Swartz’s talk(58 MB MP3) then you’ll hear that at about the seven minute mark he talks about FRBR. The Open Library plans on FRBRizing its collections, and from the sounds of it they’ll go beyond the usual stuff when they do relations betweens different entities. Excellent. Around the twenty-five minute mark, there’s a question about FRBR and how the relationships will be chosen and made. The whole thing is worth a listen.

UPDATE: Around thirty-six minutes in, Greg Crane is asked a question and some interesting stuff follows.

Here’s a short video interview with Eric Hellman of OCLC done by Richard Wallis of Talis. xISBN is discussed in it.

Update: This didn’t work for me using a Linux Flash plugin in Linux Opera on FreeBSD, but it’s fine elsewhere.

I’m a regular listener of the excellent CBC show Ideas. It’s broadcast weeknights in Canada (anyone anywhere can listen to the streaming audio feed) but they also put up a show each week on their podcast feed.

Last week was the third and last episode of In Other Words (23 MB MP3), produced and presented by Barbara Nichol. It’s about literary translation. Nichol talks to translators about the relationship between the translation and the original work: is it like a writer doing a stage adaptation of a novel? Like a musician performing a composed piece of music? Like an actor performing a character on stage, reading the writer’s words but with his own inflections and actions?

You know what those all are: different expressions of the same work. The translators agree that doing a translation is like being an actor performing someone else’s work. There are cases where there is special inspiration, though, when the translation becomes its own work of art. In FRBR, are some translations their own works? Alexander Pope’s translation of The Iliad is a good one to consider this way, I think.

I recommend downloading the show and keeping FRBR in mind while you listen. If you like good radio, subscribe to the podcast feed.

Jon Udell has an interesting blog and most Fridays he posts a telephone interview. The blog is worth reading and the podcast series is worth monitoring. Last Friday Udell interviewed Dan Chudnov, who, you may recall, has a podcast series of his own, and interviewed me last October.

Udell’s post A Conversation with Dan Chudnov About OpenURL, Context-Sensitive Linking, and Digital Archiving explains what the conversation is about, and Chudnov’s The Other End of the Mic: OpenURL, Crossing Over explains his side of it.

Here’s the conversation between Jon Udell and Dan Chudnov (24 MB MP3). I mention it here because there’s a brief mention of FRBR and xISBN at the 41 minute mark. The larger questions of archiving and access that they discuss will, at some level, all involve FRBR.

Kristin Antelman works at the North Carolina State University library and has written about FRBR and posted comments right here pon this blog. In the spring of 2006 she was interviewed for a podcast series from the Coalition for Networked Information. You can download the interview directly (15 MB MP3). It’s about the debut of the spiffy NCSU library catalogue, which is now slightly old news, but I mention it because at about the 12:00 minute mark Antelman mentions FRBR and their plans to implement it. The whole interview is interesting and worth a listen.

Come back tomorrow to see Martha Yee do the Four FRBR Questions!

You already knew I’m a library geek, but now I’m one of the Library Geeks. Last month at the Access 2006 conference in Ottawa Dan Chudnov and I had a lengthy chat in the bar of the Chateau Laurier hotel and now it’s online.

Library Geeks 008 - FRBR and OpenFRBR has the show notes with some links and a correction to a mistake I made about Canadian history (the Last Spike wasn’t gold and it was placed in 1885). You can subscribe to the podcast feed (updated 9 November to point to the right place) to get all the shows, or just listen to our talk about FRBR and OpenFRBR (38.5 MB MP3, 85 minutes).

It was great to meet Dan and I enjoyed the talk very much. What could be more fun than two library geeks talking about FRBR while drinking wine (you’ll hear the waitress come by to ask if we want another glass) in the bar of one of Canada’s best hotels?

For some relaxing weekend listening, you might be interested in the first in a new podcast series, Librarypages. In the first one, Joan Wilton talks with Prof. Shawne Miksa about cataloguing (9.4 MB MP3, 20 minutes long). (Here’s Miksa’s home page.)

They don’t mention FRBR, but they do discuss Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules and the upcoming FRBR-influenced Resource Description and Access. If you’re a cataloguer or the kind of person who debates MARC records with your friends, there won’t be much new here, but it’s still a good conversation. If you’re from outside the library field it’ll give you some background on cataloguing and give you a sense of what librarians talk about.

Beyond the OPAC: Future Directions for Web-Based Catalogues was a conference given in Australia on 18 September 2006. The texts of the papers, the presentation slides, and audio recordings of the talks are all available online! I haven’t listened to them yet, but you’ll certainly want to investigate Martha Yee’s talks and, if you want to go further, anything about RDA.

• Beyond the OPAC: Future Directions for Web-Based Catalogues (Martha Yee)
• The Well Connected Catalogue (Patricia Scott, Denise Tobin, Helen Attar)
• Setting a New Standard: Resource Description and Access (RDA) (Deirdre Kiorgaard )
• The Potential Impact of RDA on OPAC Displays (Ann Huthwaite, Philip Hider)
• OPACs and the Real Information Marketplace: Why Providing a Mediocre Product at a High Price No Longer Works (Lloyd Sokvitne)
• Seeding Search Engines with Data from the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD) (Tony Boston)
• Applying FRBR to Library Catalogues: A Review of Existing FRBRization Projects (Martha Yee)
• Managing OPACs: Approaches to the Process of OPAC Change and Development (panel discussion)

Congratulations to the National Library of Australia for making all this available. (Seen on Catalogablog.)