The FRBR Blog

Gary Price posted about this in June and pointed it out to me but I’m just getting to it now: Describing the World: Data Model Patterns, a 102 minute Library of Congress webcast done in March 2009. (I still haven’t watched it yet due to technical problems.)

Description: “When an organization is planning to develop or revise the automation of information processing, a typical first step is to analyze the underlying structure of its business. The ‘entity/relationship’ (or simply ‘data’) model is a good vehicle for doing this. What has been discovered over the years is that there are a number of structures that are universal and applicable to all kinds of organizations, both private and public. There are four fundamental categories: People and Organizations, Geography, Physical Resources and Activities and Events. Overlaying all of these are the topics of Accounting and Information Resources. This webcast will also relate this model to the Library of Congress Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).”

The speaker, David Hay, works at Capgemini Financial Services, not the sort of background one usually finds in people talking about FRBR.

In late February Jodi Schneider and I did a talk at Code4Lib 2009, which I posted about with links to the slides: What We Talk About When We Talk About FRBR.

The video of the talk is now online!

Thanks to Talis and Karen Schneider and the Code4Lib organizers and Brown University for doing all the work.

Identifying FRBR Work-Level Data in MARC Bibliographic Records for Manifestations of Moving Images, by Kelly McGrath and Lynne Bisko, is in issue 5 of The Code4Lib Journal. Here’s the abstract:

The library metadata community is dealing with the challenge of implementing the conceptual model, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). In response, the Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC) created a task force to study the issues related to creating and using FRBR-based work-level records for moving images. This article presents one part of the task force’s work: it looks at the feasibility of creating provisional FRBR work-level records for moving images by extracting data from existing manifestation-level bibliographic records. Using a sample of 941 MARC records, a subgroup of the task force conducted a pilot project to look at five characteristics of moving image works. Here they discuss their methodology; analysis; selected results for two elements, original date (year) and director name; and conclude with some suggested changes to MARC coding and current cataloging policy.

I listened to the latest episode in Dan Chudnov‘s Library Geeks podcast series, 013 – Jangle, where Dan talks to Ross Singer about Jangle. I can’t stop myself from mentioning that around 18m50s Dan Chudnov says the word “item” reminds him of FRBR, and a little while later Singer mentions about FRBR and manifestations. If you’re a library geek you’ll want to hear the episode, but don’t do it for the FRBR.

Sample sentence, from Singer: “So there is a DLF ILS-DI adapter that meets the minimum criteria of the DLF ILS-DI API.”

Online Audiovisual Catalogers (“The Internet and AV Media Catalogers Network”) has a Cataloging Policy Committee, and the OLAC CAPC formed a working group called the Moving Image Work-Level Records Task Force. And lo, they issued a report (195 KB Word) describing the findings of some subgroups.

Due to the large nature of the task, after initial discussion, the task force split up into subgroups to work on different aspects of our charge. In addition, it quickly emerged that there was not complete consensus on the definition of a moving image work nor on where to draw the boundaries between moving image works. Therefore, an additional task, that of defining a moving image work and examining some test cases to see where boundaries might usefully be drawn, was added. After each subgroup completed its work, the task force as a whole discussed the results. This paper consists of a draft of our recommendations based on the work of the first two subgroups.

I haven’t read the whole report, but at a glance there’s a lot of interesting, thoughtful, and useful stuff in it, including lists of examples and explanations of whether this is a new work based on that other work, or what:

Foreign feature film dubbed and reedited with added sequences for the American market with actors not in the foreign version (e.g., the original Godzilla)

Expression/version based on one WPE [practical work/primary expression].

Foreign feature film with the original soundtrack removed and dubbed with dialogue which has little or nothing to do with the original dialog and changes the plot (e.g., What’s up Tiger Lily?, in which Woody Allen uses dubbed dialogue to spoof a Japanese action film or the Firesign Theater DVD entitled Hot Shorts in which new dialogue is put to episodes of old movie serials, e.g., Spy Smasher becomes Revenge of the Non-Smokers)

New WPE with link to original moving image work. In most cases, changes in soundtracks are either translations or commentary and do not make a new work. However, in this case, the new plot presented in the soundtrack fits the FRBR criterion of “significant degree of independent intellectual or artistic effort” and therefore should be considered a new work. Most works of this sort are parodies, which are explicitly defined in the FRBR report as new works (p. 18).

Helpful for anyone FRBRizing movies. Martha Yee was one of the advisors.

As seen on Cataloging Futures, two Library of Congress webcasts of Barbara Tillett (who works there, she’s chief of the Cataloging Policy and Support Office) talking about Resource Description and Access:

• Resource Description and Access: Background / Overview (67 minutes, recorded 14 May 2008): “RDA (Resource Description and Access), the next generation cataloging code designed for the digital environment, is under development. This presentation provides background on its development and a general overview of the conceptual models, international principles, and structure of this new code.”
• Cataloging Principles and RDA: Resource Description and Access (49 minutes, recorded 10 June 2008): “The second in a series on RDA: Resource Description and Access, the next generation cataloging code designed for the digital environment. This presentation deals with the cataloging principles that have influenced the development of RDA; the challenges they present to the international sharing of bibliographic and authority data; and the challenges they present to the developers of RDA.”

Worth following LC webcasts aimed at librarians and archivists. Tim “Mr. LibraryThing” Spalding, the Zotero dudes, Erik Hatcher of Solr renown, David Weinberger, Jennifer Bowen, Deanna Marcum, Karen Coyle, hey, even my former library school dean Brian Cantwell Smith, they’re all there.

Now time for a bit of geekery so I keep up some Planet Code4Lib cred.

I’d rather listen to these talks than watch them, so I’ll do what I did with the WoGroFuBiCo webcast: use a couple of Unix programs to convert a RealAudio video to MP3. Here’s what I’ll do to listen to the Zotero talk with Dan Cohen and Trevor Owens:

First, I’ll look in the launch in a new window link for the video src link: rtsp://rmserv1.loc.gov/avloc03/070611ssc1330.rm URL. Those rtsp links are what I want. They may be linked directly on the page.

Next, run the streaming video through mplayer and strip out the audio and save it to a WAV file, then convert that to a low-fidelity MP3:

$ mplayer rtsp://rmserv1.loc.gov/avloc03/070611ssc1330.rm \
-ao pcm:file=zotero.wav
$ lame -b 32 zotero.wav zotero.mp3

If you have mplayer and lame you should be able to do the same, but getting them installed is up to you, I’m afraid.

(I saw this posted on David Bigwood’s Catalogablog.)

The Future of Cataloging: A Palinet Symposium was held on 29 May 2008. It looks like it was a really interesting day, so go have a look. I mention it specially because John Attig of Pennsylvania State University gave a talk called “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Current Development and Implementation Plans for Resource Description and Access (RDA).” The slides and audio for all of the talks are up, so pop over and download.

Pete Johnston posted FRBR & “Time-Based” Media, Part 1 and FRBR & “Time-Based” Media, Part 2: Clips/Segments and perhaps more will follow. Go give them a read.

Suppose I develop a machinima-based tutorial video introducing some of the features of Second Life for use by undergraduate students new to the application. I might make my tutorial available for streaming using my institution’s streaming server, both in Windows Media Video format and in QuickTime format. And I might make a QuickTime version available for download as an alternative to streaming. I might also make a second copy of that QuickTime file – exactly the same content, quality, size etc – available for download from my personal Web site.

From a FRBR viewpoint, I think this would be represented as a single FRBR Work (W01), realized in a single Expression (E01), embodied in three different Manifestations (streamed Windows Media Video (M01), streamed QuickTime (M02) and downloadable QuickTime (M03)), with the first two of these Manifestations each exemplified in a single Item, and the last exemplified in two Items.

And then it gets complicated!

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.