The FRBR Blog

“Twisty Little Passages Not So Much Alike: Applying the FRBR Model to a Classic Computer Game” was presented by Matthew Kirschenbaum, Doug Reside, Neil Fraistat, Jerome McDonough, and Dennis Jerz at Digital Humanities 2009 in June. (The classic computer game is Adventure.)

The conference program is only available as humungus 52 MB PDF and isn’t on the readable web, so to read the full abstract of the paper you’ll have to download it and look on page A22. I can’t even easily copy and paste a sample paragraph, I’m afraid, so you’re on your own.

(Thanks to Kevin Hawkins for telling me about this.)

Hi. Sorry about the delay there. What with a vacation and launching a new home page and site template where I work things got busy. My stored Bloglines search for mentions of FRBR etc. went wonky and showed me a bunch of ancient stuff, so I probably missed some things, but I’ll catch up on what I did see over August.

First, IFLA had their annual conference in Milan. Here’s a mix of links thereform:

• FRBR Review Group Meetings
• FRBR Review Group Report of Activities 2008-2009 (40KB PDF).
• Namespace report from Gordon Dunsire. Definitely read this if you’re interested in FRBR and linked data and the Semantic Web.
• FRBR Working Group on Aggregates meeting agenda, with some material for the people there, like this table of differences of the two aggregate models I reported on at the meeting last year.
• FRBR Review Group Wiki. Password-protected.
• FRBR Information Discovery in Traditional Catalogues: The TelPlus Experience (115KB PDF), a talk by Nuno Freire, Rosa Galvão, and Margarida Lopes.
• From FRBR to FRAD: Extending the Model (261KB PDF), a talk by Glenn Patton.
• Frbrisation: Towards a Bright Future for National Bibliographies (100KB PDF), talk by Jan Pisanski, Maja Zumer, and Trond Aalberg.
• Third Edition of UNIMARC Manual: Authorities Format: Implementing Concepts from the FRAD Model and the IME ICC Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (100KB PDF), talk by Mirna Willer.

Catching up on something from last month: Sharing Standards for Bibliographic Data Worldwide: An Overview of Changes in Cataloguing Practices, a talk by Barbara Tillett at the Atlantic Provinces Library Association Conference 2009 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Built on foundations established by the Anglo-American CataloguingRules (AACR), RDA (Resouce Description and Access) will provide a comprehensive set of guidelines and instructions on resource description and access covering all types of content and media. The new standard is being developed for use primarily in libraries, but consultations are being undertaken with othercommunities (archives, museums, publishers, etc.) in an effort to attain an effective level of alignment between RDA and the metadata standards used in those communities, increasing the ability to share metadata among diverse communities. Cataloguers aren’t the only professionals who will be affected by these new rules. Increasing the ability to share metadata outside of our own organizations and changing description and access rules will impact the entire information profession. Along with providing an overview of RDA and its underlying conceptual model (FRBR- Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), examples of how FRBR can benefit circulation, reference and serials will be explored.

Laurel Tarulli says it was a very good talk:

Not only did she explain RDA and FRBR in a way that made complete sense (and I’ve been to other RDA sessions), but she also touched on how this is something the entire profession needs to be paying attention to, not just cataloguers. This is interesting because, up until now, many librarians have brushed it aside as a cataloguing issue. Not so! How information is retrieved, what it will retrieve and how it is presented will all change. The relationship gathering is what really excites me. And, it should excite all librarians in and out of the cataloguing department.

I’ve been wondering when Google would go at FRBR. Dan Cohen, one of the people behind Zotero, is at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference and he’s covering it on Twitter. He was just at a talk given by Jon Orwant, the Perl guru who now works on Google Books.

• There are 120M works & 165M manifestations of works worldwide in FRBR terms according to Google. #dh09
• For those not hip to FRBR: “What is FRBR?” from Library of Congress: http://is.gd/1dgeQ #dh09
• @Musebrarian says he would be interested in how they are interpreting “works” and “manifestations.”
• @Musebrarian Orwant says they don’t do ultrastrict FRBR, but it’s close. But the numbers seem off to me; could use more explanation.

A FRBRy one-day preconference before the 2009 American Library Association conference is scheduled. Description taken from this PDF:

RDA, FRBR, and FRAD: Making the Connection

Friday, July 10, 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

This pre-conference concentrates on the role of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) in Resource Description and Access (RDA). The necessity of understanding these new conceptual foundations is key to the transition to the future cataloging environment. Participants will hear from a panel of experts on FRBR and FRAD attributes and relationships, new terminology and concepts, and participate in practical hands-on exercises.

Speakers: Barbara Tillett, Chief, Cataloging Policy and Support Office, Library of Congress; Robert Maxwell, Metadata & Special Collection Cataloging Dept Chair, Brigham Young University; Tom Delsey, RDA Editor, JSC; Glenn Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management, OCLC

Tickets: Advance: ALA Member, $249;

ALCTS Division/RT Member, $199; Non-Member, $289; Student, $99

Onsite: ALA Member, $299; ALCTS Division/RT Member, $249; Non-Member, $339; Student, $99

Event Code: AS4

Via e-mail John F. Myers sent to AUTOCAT. Sounds like there’ll be a lot of RDA on the agenda at the ALA.

Mail sent from Rice Majors to AUTOCAT:

The next meeting of the ALCTS FRBR Interest Group will be at ALA Annual in Chicago on Friday, July 10, from 10:30 am to 12:00 pm, in the Chicago Hilton. The room assignment is Northwest 1.

If you would like to give a presentation or otherwise speak at the meeting, please do send me a note to let me know what you’ll be covering and how long you’ll need. Also on the agenda will be the election of a vice-chair/chair elect for this interest group. Finally, we’ll also plan to include a discussion time during the meeting for a less formal conversation about FRBR testing, workflow, implementations, and questions.

I’ve never been but from the looks of it you should check it out if you read this blog and you’re at the ALA. Some background:

• Description of FRBR Interest Group meeting at ALA Midwinter in January 2009
• Galen Charlton’s notes on the 2008 ALA meeting

From Rules to Entities: Cataloguing with RDA, a one-day workshop, is happening today in Montreal, Canada. It’s organized by the Technical Services Interest Group of the Canadian Library Association. Among the speakers are Pat Riva, chair of the FRBR Review Group, and Tom Delsey, who played a large role in creating FRBR.

The whole event is being webcast and you can watch it (rather, listen to it — the video isn’t working) today, free and without registration, or later, because it will be archived.

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.

Last week Jodi Schneider and I gave a talk at Code4Lib 2009 in Providence, RI: “What We Talk About When We Talk About FRBR.”

When vendors talk about FRBRization they usually mean grouping manifestations into works. When we talk about FRBR, we mean something far richer and rewarding. What FRBRization algorithms are available and in use now, how well do they work, and how do they present the relationships? We’ll look at the LC FRBR Display Tool, OCLC’s work-set algorithm, LibraryThing’s user-contributed groupings, and VTLS’s system. We’ll discuss their benefits, flaws, and what we need for the future.

In the talk we set out our ideas of weak, strong and complete FRBRization. Weak FRBRization is where we’re mostly at now, with work-set groupings. Strong FRBRization means that all the Group 1 entities (Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item) are handled and their relationships fully described. Complete FRBRization means that all entities and their relationships are fully described and and all of this is described using standard vocabularies and expressed as linked data.

We ended by asking everyone to work on three things over the next year:

1. Demand strong FRBRization.
2. Build linked data.
3. Create the algorithms.

Like all the talks it was recorded and a video will go up soon. I’ll link to it when it does. In the meantime, there are these:

• Slides (2.3 MB PDF)
• My speaking notes (62 KB PDF)

Here are links to the entity-relationship diagrams we used to illustrate weak, strong, and complete FRBRization:

• Weak FRBRization
• (Less weak)
• Strong FRBRization
• (Almost complete FRBRization)
• Complete FRBRization

Jodi and I had never in person until Code4Lib, though we’ve known each other online for quite a while. We put our proposal together in half an hour, chatting in IRC while we edited a Google doc, three hours before the deadline. It all turned out very well and I was delighted to have her as a partner. The conference was great. I’ll be back next year.

Kevin Hawkins gave a talk earlier this month at the 2008 Annual TEI Members Meeting: FRBR Group 1 Entities and the TEI Guidelines (50 KB PDF). Slides for the talk are also available (288 KB PDF).

When speaking about literature or about text encoding, we sometimes use terms like work, text, and document quite loosely—so loosely, in fact, that you could hold an entire graduate-level seminar or publish a whole book to discuss the meanings of these three words. While lexical ambiguity is a common feature of human language, loose usage may point to a deeper ontological ambiguity—or simply a lack of clarity—over what is being discussed. The various members of a bibliographic family are confused not only by novice text encoders but also, I believe, by the many contributors to the TEI guidelines. Clarifying this confusion over what is the object of encoding may help us to get around some of our persistent problems in applying TEI markup and lead to texts that are more machine-readable than at present.

While there are many ontologies of bibliographic families, for this analysis I will apply the FRBR model to TEI text encoding.

TEI is the Text Encoding Initiative, and if you don’t know it, this section of their guidelines will give you an idea of how they’re marking up novels, poetry, plays, essays, nonfiction, etc.

Also, back in August, Hawkins gave a talk at Modern Information Technologies and Written Heritage: From Ancient Texts to Electronic Libraries in Russia.

• Entailment of Entities and Implicature of Attributes in the FRBR Model (72 KB PDF)
• Логическое следование сущностей и импликатура атрибутов в ER-модели «Функциональных требований к библиографическим записям» (Russian translation, 217 KB PDF)
• Slides for the talk (English) (159 KB PDF)