The FRBR Blog

Ingbert R. Floyd and Allen H. Renear’s What Exactly Is an Item in the Digital World? is up in their university’s repository. (”Institutional repositories,” for those of you unfamiliar with the term, are web sites where people can put stuff. Which is no big deal, except that they’re official and run by an institution — probably a university or its library — and there are probably more good intentions about putting stuff into them then actual stuff getting uploaded.) It’s a five-page paper but it says it’s a poster from the 2007 ASIST conference, so I don’t know. Floyd’s new to the blog but Renear’s been mentioned before.

ABSTRACT: IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is a model of the bibliographic universe. Although initially its application to the digital world appears to be straightforward, upon closer examination puzzles arise. One is that within the digital world it is surprisingly difficult to say exactly what FRBR items really are. On the one hand, the ontological candidates for items (concrete physical states of the computing system) are rarely identified and treated as items in practice — even though they may indeed be affirmed as items in theoretical discussions. On the other hand, objects that manifestly fail to meet the basic ontological criteria for FRBR items are commonly treated as if they are items. We describe this situation and, based on a re-factoring of FRBR into a set of roles (relationships) rather than a set of entity types explore two possible resolutions. One, favored by the second author, is consistent with ontology implicit in the original FRBR vision, but allows assignment of item attributes and roles to things that are not items; the other, favored by the first author, is a radical departure from the underlying FRBR ontology, but preserves the original attribute assignments and roles.

Presentations by Peter Cliff of UKOLN, including one from a conference on 22 April 2008: FRBR and Metadata Application Profiles (4 MB Power Point).

Interesting: He tagged resources used in the presentation at http://del.icio.us/tag/vifws2008-frbr. Nice.

Sam Gyun Oh gave a talk at Topic Maps 2008 called MARC, FRBR and RDA: The Topic Maps Perspective. “So can librarians save the world? This presentation argues that they can at least make a significant contribution to solving the problem of infoglut, but only if they update their skill set and understand how the concepts they have worked with for decades can be applied using modern technologies like Topic Maps.” Slides available as PDF or PPT.

This isn’t directly about FRBR but I know you won’t mind.

Announcing the One Big Library Unconference

http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

E-mail: onebig@yorku.ca

When: Friday 27 June 2008, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Where: The Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

“It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special libraries, private libraries. But really there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world.”

The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians, technologists, and other interested people, talking about the present and future of libraries.

It’s organized and sponsored by York University Libraries and members of the YUL Emerging Technologies Interest Group: Stacy Allison-Cassin, William Denton, and John Dupuis.

In an interconnected world, all physical and virtual libraries can really be thought of as branches of One Big Library. We would like toget together and explore that concept. Areas of interest:

• The future of libraries
• Collaboration on building One Big Library collections and services
• Uses of social software in libraries
• Tools to support and extend the One Big Library

Our goals are:

• Bringing people interested in the future of libraries together with the hope of sparking collaboration and cooperation
• Starting conversations between people in different kinds of libraries, and people inside and outside libraries
• Intellectual stimulation and fun!

Find out more, sign up, and suggest a topic for a talk, on the wiki: http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

David Bigwood noticed that the report of the 21 August 2007 meeting of the Working Group on Aggregates (23 KB PDF) had been posted.

Members and observers discussed the draft of a paper by Ed O’Neill and Maja Žumer. The draft, sent to committee members several weeks prior to IFLA, summarizes the difficulties and inconsistencies in applying the FRBR model to aggregates, and applies three different, previously identified, modeling approaches to two different works: The Deptford trilogy; and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. This draft document represents a response to the previous year’s meeting in Seoul, South Korea, where committee members and observers felt the need to have a document describing different models for aggregates, and also describing the ambiguity of the FRBR model in terms of the treatment of aggregates.

The group briefly deliberated the often-discussed “Universality Principle”, which states that if an entity is a work in any of its manifestations, it is a work in all of its manifestations.

… A WG member and an observer noted that we need to define these models in a timely manner, or we could be forced to inherit models that have been defined and applied by innovative creators of library management and e-commerce systems. These software creators might even use hidden organizing principles that would not necessarily work in the best interests of users. The forces that produce these new systems already determine display and access, and we need to determine how best to model and work in these new environments.

The slides from Karen Coyle’s talk at the Code4Lib 2008 conference are up: R&D: Can Resource Description Become Rigorous Data? (641 KB PDF). I hope the audio and/or video are available soon. I’d love to listen and/or watch.

I’m not at Code4Lib 2008. I wish I was. Hello to anyone there!

Nicole Engard’s Code4Lib 2008: The Internet Archive and Karen Coombs’s Code4Lib Day 1 Morning Talks both report on the talk that Brewster Kahle (of the Internet Archive) gave.

Engard writes:

The next step according to Brewster is to build the catalog and “we finally need to do this FRBR thing - come on guys, it’s not that hard!!!” Even if the digital copy of the book isn’t available yet, it makes sense to provide pages for the book with catalog data that pulls information from sites like Amazon and other book information sites.

Coombs summarizes this part of his talk: “FRBR is a must!!”

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.

Over at her blog Cataloging Futures (which I think of as Cataloguing Futures), Christine Schwartz posted Resource Description and Access (RDA) Update Forum last week, covering an ALA conference session about what’s going on with Resource Description and Access (the new FRBR- and FRAD-based cataloguing rules now being written). This’ll give you the bird’s eye lowdown on all that. If you think it’s confusing following what’s going on with how RDA is developing, imagine being one of the people writing it!

Martha Yee and Ed Jones gave a talk at the ALA Midwinter conference a week ago, on 14 January. The ALA’s Metadata blog blogged the talk with some copious notes and Yee put up PowerPoint slides on her site: Martha Yee’s slides (182 KB PPT) and Ed Jones’s slides (118 KB PPT).

As you’d expect from these two, very interesting stuff. I wish the talk had been recorded. I’d love to hear it.