The FRBR Blog

Last week I was at Code4Lib 2009 and had a great time. I learned a lot about linked data, among other things — everyone who went is talking about linked data now — and I’ll be posting more about that. Jodi Schneider and I gave a talk and I’ll post the full details next. Until then, a few recent things to check out.

• Alastair Miles’s Code4RDA project page at Google Code. “This is an open source project to develop software for the Resource Description and Access (RDA) library standard. One goal of this work is to provide a bridge between RDA, the DCMI and the W3C Semantic Web Activity.”
• Read the revised and now final Statement of International Cataloguing Principles from IFLA. The English version (103 KB PDF) says “This statement replaces and broadens the scope of the Paris Principles from just textual works to all types of materials and from just the choice and form of entry to all aspects of bibliographic and authority data used in library catalogues. It includes not only principles and objectives (i.e., functions of the catalogue), but also guiding rules that should be included in cataloguing codes internationally, as well as guidance on search and retrieval capabilities…. This statement builds on the great cataloguing traditions of the world and also on the conceptual model in the IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).”
• Building a “FRBR-Inspired” Catalog: The Perseus Digital Library Experience (1 MB PDF), by Alison Babeu, from January 2008. I just found out about it last week when I sat beside Alison at Code4Lib 2009. “In the fall of 2005, the Perseus Project experimented with creating a FRBRized catalog for its current online classics collection, a collection that consists of several hundred classical texts in Greek and Latin as well as reference works and scholarly commentaries regarding these works…. Our catalog should not be called a FRBR catalog perhaps, but instead a ‘FRBR Inspired catalog.’ As such our main goal has been “practical findability,” we are seeking to support the four identified user tasks of the FRBR model, or to “Search, Identify, Select, and Obtain,” rather than to create a FRBR catalog, per se.” It’s 87 pages long and very comprehensive. The Perseus Project is a great piece of work.
• John Updike and the Problem of the Original Text. Five expressions of Rabbit, Run.

• Edward Betts from the Open Library: Works pages live on Open Library staging. Openly accessibly work-manifestation groupings, with work identifiers. In test still. This is big. Here’s Murder On the Orient Express.
• Martin Malmsten, Making a Library Catalogue Part of the Semantic Web, from Proceedings of International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2008. Linked data! Here’s one edition of Murder On the Orient Express in Libris, Sweden’s national union catalogue. In the source is a linked to the same information RDF and you’ll notice “frbr-related” links to other records.
• The FRBRy Variations Digital Music Library System software is now available on Sourceforge! “Variations provides online access to streaming audio and scanned score images with a flexible access control framework to ensure respect for intellectual property. In addition to access tools, Variations also includes analysis and annotation tools useful in music teaching and learning. With Variations, institutions can digitize recordings and scores from their own collections and provide those materials to their students and faculty in support of teaching, learning, and research.”

• Bernie Sloan sent Personal perspectives on library use to ngc4lib and a long thread started
• I posted and said in part “I’m starting to think an Internet-scale open bibliographic metadata commons (with complete FRBRization) is coming soon, and if we’re not the ones who make it, the rest of the Semantic Web people will make it for us with the parts we’ve made available so far, and lots of librarians will sit in their basement cubicles wondering why no-one else listens when they tell each other how important their work is.”
• Tim “Mr. LibraryThing” Spalding followed up, pointed out something I’d missed, and said “LibraryThing members are doing *6,000* FRBR acts per day now. That’s a minimum of 12,000 works combined. Similar effort goes into author combinations, identification of ‘distinct’ homonymous authors, etc. etc.”
• Then Karen Coyle posted FRBRization in LT and a new interesting thread took off. Poke around the archives if you’re not on the list.

There are a number of “This Week in ___” summaries out there. I’m behind on things, so I’m going to catch up on some old stuff. Call it “Last Week in FRBR.”

I’d like to change frbr.org into something involving other people. FRBR’s far more widely known and used now than it was in May 2005 when I started this blog. My interests have evolved and my work has changed. More on this in another post.

• Ed Summers, Work Identifers and the Web. “Both OCLC Worldcat and LibraryThing mint URIs for bibliographic works…. [T]he library community really does web identifiers for works–or more precisely web identifiers for human readable records about works. What’s missing (IMHO) is the ability to use that identifier to get back something meaningful for a machine.”
• Phil Barker, Identifiers for UK OER “Works.” “Would it be useful and feasible to have a single identifier to link together all the instances of a learning resource?”
• Xiaoming Liu, New xISBN Bookmarklets Supports Thousands of Libraries. “The previous xISBN bookmarket supports more than 300 libraries, however, the list was manually maintained and it’s challenging to keep these links up-to-date, By ingesting good Registry OPAC information into xISBN bookmarklet, we are able to support thousands more libraries in a more sustainable way.”
• Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba, FRBRizing Legacy Data: Issues and Challenges(1.1 MB PDF), slides from 24 January 2009 ALA Midwinter talk. As part of the Kent State FRBR project they took the OCLC FRBR Work-Set Algorithm, experimented with it, and hacked on it a bit.
• Alastair Miles, Re: datasets for testing rda at scale, from the DC-RDA mailing list archives. “This is just an update to say that I’ve converted the LOC/data to marc xml and from there to mods xml. My next step is do some analysis of the loc data in mods xml to get an overview of the elements used, then to try to design at least a partial mapping from mods xml to RDF using the RDA and FRBR schemas.”

Coming up: in a couple of weeks Jodi Schneider and I are giving a talk at Code4Lib 2009: “What We Talk About When We Talk About FRBR.” I’ll link to the video when it’s up.

From the BBC Radio Labs blog: In Search of Cultural Identifiers (lots of links missing–go read the full post)

OpenLibrary are looking to enhance this model to allow grouping of publications into works which is fantastic news. If you can contribute code or knowledge I’d encourage you to do so. And the BBC isn’t all that interested in products. Neither are users.

If I tell someone that I’m reading Crash they generally don’t care if I’m reading this version or this version or this version. What’s interesting isn’t the product but the cultural artifact. It’s the same story with programmes. Radio 7′s David Copperfield isn’t a dramatisation of this or this or this, it’s a dramatisation of this – the abstract cultural artifact or work.

The problem is probably so obvious it hardly warrants a blog post but now I’ve started… Lots of websites exist to shift products. So when they’re created the developers model products not looser cultural artifacts. And because the cultural artifact isn’t modelled it doesn’t have a URL, isn’t aggregatable and can’t be pointed at. As Tom Coates pointed out people use links to explain, disambiguate and clarify meaning. If something isn’t given a URL it doesn’t exist in the vocabulary of the web.

(Via Ed Summers and Eduardo Leite.)

• Ed Summers, 10,000 Books and FRBR: “The news about 100,000 books on Freebase got me poking around with curl. I was pleased to see that Freebase actually distinguishes between a book as a work, and a particular edition of that book. To FRBR aficionados this will be familiar as the difference between a Work and a Manifestation.”
• Karen Coyle, FRBR and Group 2 & 3 Oddities: “This time I was thinking about the way that the entities are used with the subject relationship. But before I get to that, there’s always the publisher to torment me.”
• Future4catalogers’ Blog, all about RDA.
• Jonathan Rochkind, Of Identifiers, Matching, OCLCnums, and Umlaut: “Another source of this same data is the OCLC xID services, that would also let Umlaut take an LCCN and figure out what OCLCnum or ISBN or ISSN might also apply to that title, and vice versa. Umlaut doesn’t currently use xID, but should.”
• Joe Hourcle?, Thoughs on Aggregate Works in FRBR: “Aggregate works are a form of collection, and we can potentially have many different forms of collections. Collections may be aggregated in a single manifestation, or they may exist as a series of independant aggregations.”

Gene Fieg sent some interesting mail to the RDA-L mailing list on Monday. Look through the responses for good comments.

After reading RDA and its application of FRBR, it seems that we dealing with librarianship’s application of Platonism, especially in the descriptions work, expression, manifestation, and item. There really is no “work”; it is like a Platonic form, which is reflected in its physicality by expression, manifestation, and item. We, as catalogers, actually deal with the item. So perhaps in the real world the relationship should be item, manifestation, expression, work. The item points to the manifestation which points to the expression which points to the Platonic ideal, work.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has entries on Platonism in metaphysics and Platonism in mathematics.

OCLC has xISBN, of course. And LibX, the incredibly useful Firefox extension, uses it. If you’re looking at one print manifestation and you know its ISBN, it’s the easy way to get to other manifestations of the same work from your library. (LibX also does much more. Check it out if you don’t use it already.)

Tony Hirst posted Looking Up Alternative Copies of a Book on Amazon, via ThingISBN, wherein he shows, with snazzy graphics, how he uses Yahoo Pipes (which is a really impressive piece of work, and fun to use) and LIbraryThing‘s thingISBN to do something similar.

He spoke about it at Mashed Libraries 2008 and Andy McGregor wrote Mashing thingISBN and Library Lookup Using Yahoo Pipes Courtesy of Mashed Libraries 2008

A brief pointer to Jonathan Rochkind’s OCLC, and What We Lose Without Openness (A True Story), talking about the closed nature of OCLC and how the xID services, like xISBN, would benefit from opening up the source and data:

But maybe someone else wanted to work on an algorithm for doing this. Maybe they come up with something good. Maybe they want to provide such a service. As test data for their development, and to make such a finished service useful, they’d need a big corpus, like, WorldCat. Maybe OCLC would give them permission to use the WorldCat corpus like that–if they are willing to sign away certain rights on what to do with it, and if OCLC doens’t think it threatens WorldCat’s business model. But even having to ask and negotiate is a barrier to agile experimentation and innovation–there are plenty of people doing interesting stuff with not enough time, they don’t have time for legal negotiations with OCLC, and shouldn’t need to engage in them, it doesn’t serve us.

Preach it. Xiaoming Liu’s doing a great job, but he’s just one programmer.

• LCCN Support and Other Improvements in xID Service, an update from OCLC’s Xiaoming Liu.
• David Weinberger had dinner with Sam Oh in April and talked about FRBR.
• Sam Oh‘s slides from his ATOMS 2007 talk Topic Maps-Driven Semantic Services for National Library of Korea (3.6 MB PDF).