The FRBR Blog

After reading her online for I don’t know how long, I finally got to meet Karen Coyle last week. Would you like to do the Four FRBR Questions? I asked. Sure, she said. Would you mind doing them live on video, with no preparation, so I can try the first FRBR Blog videocast? Sure, she said. We were just getting ready when the break was over and we had to get back to the meeting, so there’s no video. I caught up with her by e-mail instead.

If you don’t follow Coyle’s InFormation, her blog, you should. Over on her web site, you can find lots of her writings (back to 1994), such as her column in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, and links to other papers like last year’s Resource Description and Access: Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century, which she co-wrote with Diane Hillmann (who did the four questions herself last May). (The thing about the subtitle of the article, in case you missed it, is that we’re in the 21st century now.) And if you look in the bottom right-hand corner of the credits on the report from the WoGroFuBiCo you’ll see her listed as a consultant. She spoke at Code4Lib 2008 and a recording of the talk should show on up the conference site soon.

When did you first hear about FRBR?

I assume it was posted to the MARC list when issued, but I don’t remember when I first decided to download it and read it. I do remember that it was a big topic at MARBI (the MARC standards group) and that at the time there were people who pronounced it “Furby.” Interestingly, I do not believe that it has ever been the object of a MARC standards request.

What’s your involvement with it now?

I am currently working on a project to model the RDA data elements in RDF. One important goal of that project is to have a clear definition of each data element used by the library cataloging community. Because RDA is modeled on FRBR and FRAD, we need to understand how the elements relate to FRBR entities and how that affects the elements and their definitions. (Note that I’m using “data elements” here as a shorthand, but RDF actually works with “properties,” which have special meaning in that standard.)

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

We need to think beyond cataloging with FRBR to what implementation of FRBR could mean in terms of services to our users. The use of FRBR has the potential to allow us to move library data into the nascent semantic web. We could even be visible pioneers in that area, given the huge amount of carefully crafted data that we have in our databases. The semantic web functionality promises a much richer information environment than our library catalogs provide today, and one in which library data can interact seamlessly with the entire Web.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

FRBR describes bibliographic data — like authors, titles, and subjects — as a web of things with relationships between those things.

Previously in the series:

• August 2005: Patrick Le Boeuf
• August 2005: Pat Riva
• January 2006: Barbara Tillett
• Feburary 2007: Martha Yee
• May 2007: Diane Hillmann
• January 2008: Shawne Miksa
• January 2008: Arlene Taylor

(Picture of Karen Coyle talking at Code4Lib 2008 taken from Rob Styles’s Flickr photoset by Creative Commons rules.)

Three days ago, Shawne Miksa answered the Four FRBR Questions, and today I’m delighted that Arlene Taylor, editor of Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools, joins the pantheon.

Arlene Taylor is professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh. Before moving to the library school there she taught at U Chicago and Columbia; the lengthy CV on her web site lists all her previous work, starting as a librarian in a junior high school. A more personal introduction to her career is in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly (32: 3): A Tribute to Arlene Taylor (2001) . I used her books The Organization of Information and [Wynar's] Introduction to Cataloging and Classification to get through my cataloguing courses in library school.

When did you first hear about FRBR?

I have been friends with Barbara Tillett for many years. I first heard about FRBR from her while she was working as a consultant to the study group.

What’s your involvement with it now?

I try to keep up with what is going on. I have been asked to speak about FRBR to various groups (e.g., the Missouri Library Association), and to LIS graduate school cataloging classes. I attended the FRBR workshop at OCLC 2005. I attended the meeting of the FRBR Implementers group at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia (January 2008). I edited a book on FRBR that was published by Libraries Unlimited in November 2007, which includes my chapter attempting to explain FRBR in understandable terms.

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

I think that there is a huge need for all librarians and other organizers of information to become educated about FRBR and about how much it could help users better find much of what they are looking for. Getting the FRBR model implemented into library systems, and better yet, implemented on the Web, is going to be dependent upon the persistence of those of us who understand the importance of organizing information. We have to convince system designers of the superior value of this model in showing relationships among entities being sought by users.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

FRBR is a way of explaining the relationships between and among works, authors, and concepts in the bibliographic universe. And the bibliographic universe, if you were wondering, encompasses all instances of recorded information. (A student once wrote on an exam that the bibliographic universe is where Professor Taylor lives.)

Previously in the series:

• August 2005: Patrick Le Boeuf
• August 2005: Pat Riva
• January 2006: Barbara Tillett
• Feburary 2007: Martha Yee
• May 2007: Diane Hillmann
• January 2008: Shawne Miksa

It’s an exciting week here: two people have answered the Four FRBR Questions. First up is Shawne Miksa, who teaches at the University of North Texas’s School of Library and Information Sciences. She’s the chair of the ALA‘s RDA Implementation Task Force, so she’s got FRBR on her mind, since Resource Description and Access is grounded in FRBR. She’s self-archived some of her publications and you can read Understanding Support of FRBR’s Four User Tasks In MARC-Encoded Bibliographic Records, which was in the ASIST Bulletin 33: 6 (Aug/Sep 2007).

When did you first hear about FRBR?

Probably 2002. The title alone tingled up and down my spine.

What’s your involvement with it now?

Nothing direct, but I am the chair of the RDA Implementation Task Force.

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

Patience.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

Multi-dimensional answer gardens.

Shawne Miksa is the daughter of Francis Miksa, who did that that great talk I linked to a a couple of weeks ago.

Today it’s my great pleasure to give you Diane Hillmann’s answers to the Four FRBR Questions. She’s a major figure in the metadata world, and if you’ve ever done a Dublin Core project you probably pored over her Using Dublin Core guide while deciding what to do.

She’s done a lot this year, and it’s only May. She’s been in the FRBR news because she was at the RDA and Dublin Core sit-down in London at the start of the month (on the DC side of the table). She’s been writing for the Library and Information Technology Association blog about the WoGroFuBiCo meetings. Her January paper with Karen Coyle, RDA: Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century, attracted a lot of attention. There’s a short biography of her on the D-Lib site, matched with that article.

When did you first hear about FRBR?

I read the report when it first came out and was very intrigued by it, and have followed discussions about it since. I think my first attempt to apply it was with serials, which is kind of like starting out a mountaineering hobby with Mount Everest. I also attended the 2005 FRBR Workshop which was extremely helpful.

What’s your involvement with it now?

My current interest is as co-chair of the newly formed DCMI/RDA Task Group, which will be moving forward the recent agreement between the RDA developers and the Semantic Web communities (see http://www.bl.uk/services/bibliographic/meeting.html for the original announcement).

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

More concrete applications using FRBR! OCLC has done good work pushing the envelope with their FictionFinder project and in developing their FRBR Work-Set Algorithm. It’s also been great seeing that the use of FRBR has moved into non-library venues, such as the new Eprints Application Profile. I think the second thing that the FRBR world needs most is to recognize that it’s not really necessary for all the communities using FRBR to agree on the boundaries between the Group I entities in order to make FRBR work for us generally. So long as we know WHO SAYS this or that is a work, or an expression, etc., we should be able to cope. This notion that all must agree before we move forward has been a significant impediment, it seems to me.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

I have actually had to explain FRBR to programmers and developers, most of whom are not librarians, so I should feel more capable of this than I actually do feel most of the time. I would start by saying that FRBR is a way to think about how created resources change and morph over time, and how those changes can be described. There’s lots more to it, of course, but that’s how I’d start.

(Digression: I was at the FRBR Workshop — I started this blog right after — but I didn’t meet Diane Hillmann there. If you look at the photograph of everyone at the workshop (requires Flash) then you can see her in the second row, second from the right; just behind her left shoulder is Lynne Howarth of the University of Toronto (who recently stepped down from the FRBR Review Group) and just behind Howarth’s left shoulder is me!)

My thanks to Diane Hillmann for taking the time to answer the questions. She’s the fifth person in the Four FRBR Questions series. Previously:

• August 2005: Patrick Le Boeuf
• August 2005: Pat Riva
• January 2006: Barbara Tillett
• Feburary 2007: Martha Yee

Following up on her UCLA Film and Television Archive OPAC announcement that I posted here on Wednesday (which includes some links to follow to learn more about her FRBR-related work), today Martha Yee answers the Four FRBR Questions!

When did you first hear about FRBR?

In the course of FRBR development (1992-1998), in order to help in filling out the tables in the back of FRBR that link FRBR entities to particular elements of the bibliographic description, the Study Group sent out a questionnaire to people in the field, and I was one of the people who was asked to fill out a questionnaire, in my case concerning moving image material. The definitions of the entities were still not clear, and I recall writing to ask for clarification before sending in my filled out questionnaire, and feeling afterwards that I had not understood the intended definition of “manifestation,” so had sent in erroneous information! But I can’t remember the year that questionnaire was sent out.

What’s your involvement with it now?

I try to follow developments from a distance and comment upon suggested changes when asked to do so, or given the opportunity to do so.

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

Ability to be involved in the design of new and better catalog interface software from the ground up, as well as a world-wide effort to rethink the process of shared cataloging in this new era of the Internet. Could we design excellent standard catalog interface software to be used by everyone everywhere to access a single virtual catalog, the maintenance of which is shared by all catalogers everywhere? Much of what blocks our ability to implement FRBR effectively is essentially our current method of shared cataloging, which involves sharing atomized manifestation records in an environment of thousands of separate catalogs, with inefficient methods of coordinating what we call the FRBR entities across all catalogs.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

A model for transforming records for the books published by publishers into displays of the entities that users actually seek: 1) works, which may have been published thousands of times under many different titles associated with many different variants of their author’s names; 2) persons and corporate bodies, which may be known by many different variants of their names; and 3) concepts discussed in works, which may have many synonyms, and which may be known by homonyms that also represent completely different concepts.

My thanks to Martha Yee for taking the time to answer the questions. She’s the fourth person in the Four FRBR Questions series; the other three are:

• August 2005: Patrick Le Boeuf
• August 2005: Pat Riva
• January 2006: Barbara Tillett

It’s a great pleasure today to give you the Four FRBR Questions answered by Dr. Barbara B. Tillett, Chief of the Cataloging Policy and Support Office at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She’s been involved with FRBR for almost fifteen years now! For more about that and the rest of her career, read “An Interview with Barbara B. Tillett,” by Martin Kurth (Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 32 (3), 2001). I mention her a lot on this weblog because she’s very involved with FRBR and has spoken about it all over the world. She’s a member of (most pertinently here) the FRBR Review Group and the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR.

When did you first hear about FRBR?

In 1992 when I was asked to be a consultant to the Study Group on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records with Elaine Svenonius and Ben Tucker. Later Ben retired and Tom Delsey was brought on.

What’s your involvement with it now?

I continue on the FRBR Review Group and continue to speak about the conceptual model and its application to various things like serials, cataloging rules, authority control, other standards, etc.

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

Very loaded question as it assumes an FRBR world, which, if we had it, would be great and probably not need anything! But on the other hand if you mean what does the world need need with respect to FRBR organizing the descriptions of our resources and meeting user needs, it needs a great system to take full advantage of the FRBR model’s potential, making the data entry and maintenance simple and the user navigation and understanding intuitive.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

FRBR is a model of the relationships among things libraries organize and is a listing of the essential information we use to find, identify, select, and obtain those things.

Today I’m delighted to have the second instalment of Four FRBR Questions with another eminent FRBRian. Pat Riva, new chair of the FRBR Review Group, was kind enough to answer the questions. If you haven’t met her, here’s a chance to get to know a bit about her right at the start of her tenure as chair.

When did you first hear about FRBR?

I’m not really sure. I think it must have been during the lead-up to the 1997 International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR (held in Oct. 1997 in Toronto). The major papers were circulated prior to the conference and discussed on a listserv. Shelley Sherry Vellucci’s paper on bibliographic relationships summarized all the important work in that (very interesting) area, and let me realize that the IFLA FRBR report was something I wanted very much to know more about. I wasn’t able to do anything further (due to being heavily involved in a major system migration in my day job) until 2001 when I made FRBR-related work (specifically membership in the Format Variation Working Group at that time newly established by the JSC) the focus of my sabbatical. After that, one thing just lead to another.

What’s your involvement with it now?

A few weeks ago I would have said an interested commentator, but as of August 19 I’ve started as chair of the FRBR Review Group. I remain involved in the RDA revision process as a member of the Examples Group. I’m very interested in seeing how the incorporation of FRBR concepts and principles will work out in the cataloguing code.

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

Large-scale implementations in systems.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

It’s all about relationships, some things are more closely related, others more distantly, others not at all. FRBR gives us the framework to capture our intuitions about these relationships.

Today I debut a new feature: Four FRBR Questions. Every now and then I’ll ask these questions of people in the FRBR world and post the answers here. There are some really interesting people doing work in this area, and this will let us get to know them better.

The first person I asked was, naturally, Patrick Le Boeuf, chair of the FRBR Review Group, keeper of the bibliography, and owner of the mailing list (see links on left). You’ve read his papers, seen the issue of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly he edited, and you may have met him at a conference. I asked for just a one-sentence answer to each of the questions — he’s a very busy man, even more so than usual with an IFLA meeting starting next week — but he was extremely generous and gave much longer answers that are fascinating reading. I thank him very much for this, and for all his FRBR work!

When did you first hear about FRBR?

From 1994 to 1998 I was a cataloguer for sound recordings at Bibliothèque nationale de France. At that time, we used to create very complete descriptions for CDs, to the level of each individual track (unfortunately, the cataloging policy of the BnF department for audiovisual materials has changed now, and CD descriptions now are so poor that they are virtually of no use). It is a habit, in sound recordings industry, to reorganize the same individual tracks into various combinations that are released and re-released over time. I went tired of cataloguing the same tracks over and over again, especially in jazz music, with various levels of precision and accuracy according to the more or less important amount of seriousness of music publishers (liner notes are sometimes very detailed, sometimes very rough, for the very same track). I began therefore to think that it would be a good idea to create some kind of authority records for sound tracks (at the conceptual level of ISRC), and to make links from bibliographic records to such authority records in order to describe the contents of sound recordings and to have that information indexed and retrievable. Then, in 1998, I changed jobs and was in charge of authority files for uniform titles for music, in a department that was headed by Nadine Boddaert (the compiler of Anonymous Classics: A List of Uniform Headings for European Literature (PDF, 1600 KB)), who was at the time a member of the IFLA Cataloguing Section’s Standing Committee. She introduced me to FRBR. It was a revelation. I immediately thought: “This is precisely what cataloguers for sound recordings urgently need!” One year later, I changed jobs again, and I entered the department for standardization. There, I was asked to translate the “FRBR Final Report” into French, which I began to do enthusiastically.

What’s your involvement with it now?

At the moment I am chair of the IFLA FRBR Review Group, but I will have to resign from that position this summer. I am also a member of the “FRBR/CIDOC CRM Harmonization Working Group,” which aims at translating the FRBR entity-relationship model into the object-oriented formalism, so that it can be “plugged” to the CIDOC CRM model developed by the museum community. I intend to go on working on that topic, even though I may have to leave the National Library of France in the near future, which may make it more difficult for me. But I am profoundly convinced that this task (converting FRBR to OO and transforming it into something closer to an actual ontology) is too important to be abandoned now.

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

I don’t know. Perhaps, to stop discussing the “Expression” entity over and over again. Expression is not the most problematic entity in the model. Work and Manifestation pose much trickier problems. At least at a conceptual level. At the pragmatic, operational level, however, I agree that some decisions need to be made about what to include in the notion of Expression.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

“What do you mean when you say ‘a book’? Do you mean the physical thing with ink-covered sheets of paper and a binding (‘to tear a book into pieces’), or a publication (‘to order a book’), or a text (‘to write a book’), or the immaterial content of a text (‘to be impressed by a book’)?” The inconvenience of that description is that, when someone simply says “I’m reading a book”, the sentence refers to all four levels at the same time…