The FRBR Blog

I just came across The Catalogue Display of the Future?, posted by Fiacre O’Duinn on his blog on 20 April. (He’s coming to the One Big Library Unconference in June.) It pulls together some interesting stuff about how FRBR could affect catalogue interfaces.

Thom Hickey, of OCLC fame, posted FRBR and Uniform Titles on his blog Tuesday.

AACR2 lists four uses for uniform titles, but the most common is to group items that appear with multiple titles under a single heading. Works such as Don Quixote that are published in multiple languages and under hundreds of different titles benefit from this. Unfortunately, when trying to group manifestations into works, uniform titles do not always correspond to what anyone would consider a work.

Andrew Hankinson, a music PhD student at McGill in Montreal, Canada, posted My FRBR Dilemma t’other day.

I’ve been a big FRBR fan for a long time. In my cataloguing classes, I was adamant that AACR2 was the “old ‘n busted” while FRBR was “the new hotness.” If only, I posited, our data was in FRBR format. A library’s catalogue would become a berrypicker’s utopia, full of paths to be followed, relationships to be discovered and insight to be gained.

Lately, though, I’ve been having serious doubts.

His three objections — read the post for the explanations — are:

1. Every item has its own “FRBR.”
2. It’s unnatural.
3. It has relationships, but not the right kind.

• Three from Scribe. First, RDA, FRBR, and Other Acronyms, about Karen Coyle’s Code4Lib talk. “I am SO GLAD that Karen Coyle gave her talk at Code4Lib on RDA.”
• Second, Creating Meaning. “RDA and FRBR have a great ideal in place, and I love it, but I think that RDA is missing something really central in their thought processes. Even if you use machines to pull a lot of this data, and we use publisher information, and we stop caring about grammar and punctuation, it is still a ridiculously high expectation to put on catalogers to ‘create meaning’ for the entire scope of human knowledge.”
• And finally Define Yourself, Sir: “FRBR tried to help us out by changing some of the ways that we think about conceptual objects in the library world, but I don’t think that most librarians are well-versed in that FRBR world, and don’t use those terms on a regular basis. And since RDA apparently isn’t even using all of FRBR’s concepts to write their manual…well, I don’t exactly see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
• FRBR-Like Grouping and Metasearch in Koha. A bit cryptic.
• Facets, FRBR, And Bibliographic Data Modeling, a blog post by Mike Simpson on 14 December 2007. “So here’s what wound up on my chalkboard during a discussion with a couple of colleagues, about what kinds of data structures you would need to do a better job of modelling bibliographic data in a way that would enable (or at least make easier) some current library buzzwords.” One of those buzzwords is FRBR!
• Galen Charlton of Liblime posted Code4Lib 2008: RDA, a report on Karen Coyle’s talk at the conference.
• Peter Zimmerman’s notes on Sherry Vellucci’s Bibliographic Relationships in Music Catalogs (1997).

Yakov Shafranovich’s Monday blog post FRBRizing Amazon’s Content is very interesting.

About two weeks ago I accidentally stumbled on a third public service that does something similar. When Amazon launched their Kindle eBook reader they made lots of titles available as a Kindle eBook. HOWEVER, they did not want to change the ISBN numbers for these titles. So what they did is re-organize their catalog is a way that all editions of the same work now appear to be linked to together including audio, eBook, hard cover, etc. This ability is buried in their API right here and is called RelatedItems:

He’s put up bookchaser.com, a tool to compare the results from Amazon, thingISBN, and xISBN.. Compare Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (starting with the ISBN of a Canadian manifestation): 81 results at xISBN, 105 at thingISBN, and 23 at Amazon, or, as Shafranovich calls his application, amazingISBN. On the other hand, here’s a book where Amazon knows more than the other two services.

Nicolas Morin posted Expérience d’isbn (it’s in French but Google can translate it) on his blog a couple of weeks ago. It’s about looking for

J’ai une édition poche de Madame Bovary dans mon catalogue. Je prends son isbn: à partir de cette information, quelles informations puis-je récupérer à la volée via des web services disponibles ailleurs sur le web pour enrichir l’expérience de l’usager?

[I have a paperback edition of Madame Bovary in my catalogue. I take its ISBN. From this information, what information can I get on the fly via web services available elsewhere on the Web to enhance the experience of the user?]

… une chose est désormais certaine: nous avons de moins en moins un problème de données, nous avons un problème d’outils.

[One thing is certain: we have less and less a problem of data, we have a problem of tools.]

Jonathan Rochkind, systems librarian at Johns Hopkins University posted State of FRBR on his blog Wednesday. He runs through some FRBR stuff that was on his mind, given a recent discussion on the RDA mailing list.

1) Even though FRBR with it’s four Group 1 entities is already considered too complicated by some people (who think we only need three, or two), it’s actually still only a modelled approximation of the complexity of our actual bibliographic/information universe. What we represent will neccesarily be one model, and an approximation….

I actually think we can likely be succesful in getting these other sources to follow the Work-Expression-Manifestation-Item model (because it is useful, and there is nothing competing), or else succesfully translate foreign data to this model. But we aren’t going to be succesful in forcing everyone everywhere to make the same decisions about exactly where work boundaries or expression boundaries are. So an unresolved question and useful research program is: How do we build systems that deal with integrating records from sources that have made _different_ decisions about where work boundaries or expression boundaries are?

Some nice things I’ve missed:

• Jenn Riley, Musings On RDA, LC Working Group Report, and Various Other Random Things: “For example, the OCLC response touts its FRBR work as testing the WG didn’t realize was happening, but it glosses over the fact that the Work-level clustering and other FRBR-like things OCLC has been doing aren’t true FRBR implementations.”
• Christine Schwartz, ALA Midwinter: Library of Congress Working Group Report: “Having just been released a few days before, the LC working group’s report, On the Record, was a hot topic at the conference. Rather that walk through this session point by point. I’ll try to pull out some of the highlights of this highly anticipated forum.”
• Thom Hickey, What People Skip: “Jenny and I have been looking at differences in the WorldCat.org FRBR clustering and the clustering we do here in Research. Ideally we’d like them to be the same, but we keep fussing with ours in Research, so we knew there would be differences.”
• Mike Simpson, Facets, FRBR, And Bibliographic Data Modeling: “Also for this discussion, ‘FRBR’ means something like, ‘note the fact that the English translation of this Shakespeare compendium, and the German edition, are really just two variant representations of the same thing.’”
• Jessi M. Librarian, FRBR! Finally!: “Library vendors have struggled with the concept for a long time, and haven’t found a good way to implement the logic to make this happen. The wait is over for libraries! Library Thing for Libraries offers an catalog add-on option that will do exactly what Amazon has been doing for a very long time.”
• A comment to the above: “Please check out how we do FRBR in AquaBrowser at Carroll County. Search for Scarlet Letter in their catalog and see how the results are already rolled up to show 1 record for 8 versions editions.”
• Peter Zimmerman, FRBR and Music Recordings: “And although Bryant’s book [Music Librarianship: A Practical Guide ] is getting a little old (the second edition I’m reading was 1985; the first, 1959), I find myself anticipating FRBR.”
• Karen Schneider, They Tried to Make Me Go to FRBR, I Said No, No, No: “We do NOT need to stop RDA; we need to implement FRBR and get it right, not ‘test; it more; and we do NOT need to do years more of ‘user testing’ to teach us what we already know.”
• Dan Chudnov, WoGroFuBiCo Doesn’t Go Far Enough: “… until such time as we have been able to catch up on all of our other obligations and professional responsibilities and newly devote the full and complete community attention each of these critical developments vital to the future of our entire profession deserves. And testing, lots of testing, too, we can’t forget that (see 4.2.1 below).”

Last week Talisman Rob Styles posted MARC, RDF and FRBR, two initialisms and an acronym that probably get your heart racing like they do mine. In it, he points to a paper he wrote with fellow Talismen Danny Ayers and Nadeem Shabir: Semantic MARC, MARC 21 and the Semantic Web (440 KB PDF),

Abstract: The MARC standard for exchanging bibliographic data has been in use for several decades and is used by major libraries worldwide. This paper discusses the possibilities of representing the most prevalent form of MARC, MARC21, as RDF for the Semantic Web, and aims to understand the tradeoffs, if any, resulting from transforming the data. Critically our approach goes beyond a simple transliteration of the MARC21 record syntax to develop rich semantic descriptions of the varied things which may be described using bibliographic records. We present an algorithmic approach for consistently generating URIs from textual data, discuss the algorithmic matching of author names and suggest how RDF generated from MARC records may be linked to other data sources on the Web.

Thom Hickey, of OCLC renown, left a comment.

Lorcan Dempsey’s FRBR and Learning Objects (FLOR?) points to Pete Johnston’s Learning Materials and FRBR which points to Phil Barker’s LMAP Update which links to the Learning Materials Application Profile draft which says the “proposed object model borrows from the scholarly works application profile (SWAP) application model, which in turn is based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) entity model.”