The FRBR Blog

A special issue of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly will be devoted to The FRBR Family of Models. Since 1998 when Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records was first published by IFLA, the effort to develop and apply FRBR has been extended in many innovative and experimental directions. A special issue of CCQ in 2004 edited by Patrick LeBeouf was titled FRBR: Hype, or Cure-All? and included papers exploring the origins and extension of FRBR, as well as a survey of specific applications.

Submissions to the present volume should address an aspect related to the extended family of FRBR models, dialogues between the FRBR Family and other modeling technologies, and/or any specific applications of the FRBR family.

Ideas may include any of the following topics:

• Analysis of FRAD or FRSAD
• Interrelationships between FRAD, FRBR, FRSAD
• Modelling of aggregates.
• Applications of FRBR and family
• Analysis or comparisons of RDA, REICAT and other codes based on FRBR entities and relationships
• FRBRoo and its extensions, or applications
• The FRBR/CRM Dialogue
• Wider acceptance of FRBR in applications

Or any other topic that addresses the FRBR Family.

Proposals of no more than 300 words to be sent by May 31, 2011 to the guest editor, Richard Smiraglia (smiragli@uwm.edu). Decisions will be communicated to contributors no later than June 24, 2011. Delivery date of manuscripts for peer-review: [October 1, 2011]. Each article should be in the range of 5,000–8,000 words. Instructions for authors can be found at http://www.informaworld.com/0163-9374.

Acceptance of a proposal does not guarantee publication. All manuscript submissions will be subject to double-blind peer-review. Publication is scheduled for CCQ vol. 50 in 2012.

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly is dedicated to gathering and sharing information in the field of bibliographic organization. This highly respected journal considers the full spectrum of creation, content, management, use, and usability of bibliographic records and catalogs, including the principles, functions, and techniques of descriptive cataloging; the wide range of methods of subject analysis and classification; provision of access for all formats of materials; and policies, planning, and issues connected to the effective use of bibliographic data in catalogs and discovery tools. The journal welcomes papers of practical application as well as scholarly research. All manuscripts are peer reviewed. Once published, papers are widely available through Taylor & Francis’ Informaworld database and other outlets.

Richard P. Smiraglia
Editor-in-Chief, Knowledge Organization
Professor, Information Organization Research Group,
School of Information Studies
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
smiragli@uwm.edu

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.

E-mail sent out by Patricia Riva, chair of the FRBR Review Group. This is a really interesting opportunity. Note that you have to pay your way to the meetings, and they’re all over the world (recently they’ve been in South Africa, South Korea, and Canada; this year it’s Italy), so that will get expensive. Get in touch with Pat quickly if you’re interested. She mentions that if a vote is needed it’ll be on 22 August.

Call for Nominations : FRBR Review Group

The FRBR Review Group is presently accepting nominations for members to serve from 2009-2013.

The current terms of reference (below) were adopted in 2007, and will be revised in 2009 to take the completion of the FRAD model into account:

1) Review and maintain the FRBR conceptual model on an ongoing basis, incorporating revisions when needed, in both entity-relationship and object-oriented forms;

2) Develop and make available guidelines and interpretative documents to assist those applying FRBR;

3) Promote the model and encourage its use in all appropriate information organising communities and maintain links with relevant groups both within IFLA and in other communities.

FRBR Review Group members serve 4-year terms, and new members are eligible for one renewal of an additional 4 years. Two positions are available to replace two members whose non-renewable terms end in 2009. Three members complete their first terms in 2009; Pat Riva and Maja Zumer have expressed interest in being renewed. So far two new nominations have been received: Gordon Dunsire (UK), Miriam Sofstrom (Sweden).

Roster 2007-2009:

Anders Cato (Kungl. biblioteket (National Library of Sweden)) First term ends: 2009
Alan Danskin (British Library) Term ends: 2009 (non-renewable)
Françoise Leresche (Biblioth&eacaute;que nationale de France) First term ends: 2011
Eeva Murtomaa (Kansalliskirjasto (National Library of Finland)) First term ends: 2011
Glenn Patton (OCLC) Term ends: 2009 (non-renewable)
Pat Riva (Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec) First term ends: 2009
Barbara Tillett (Library of Congress) Second term ends: 2011
Maja Zumer (Univerza v Ljubljani (University of Ljubljana)) First term ends: 2009

Nominees should be experts in a relevant field, and must be able to get funding on their own for travelling to IFLA meetings. While you do not need to be a member of the Cataloguing Section Standing Committee to be eligible for the Review Group; you do need to be a personal member of IFLA or work at an institution/be a member of an association that is a member of the Cataloguing Section.

Interested persons should contact me at this address: patricia.riva@banq.qc.ca

If there are more nominations than vacancies, the election committee will organize an election in Milan at the Cataloguing Section Standing Committee meeting on August 22, 2009.

Seen on David Bigwood’s Catalogablog, quoting something else:

IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR)

Invitation to participate:

Review of “Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) — Draft Report” Available through: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/index.html or directly from: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/report090623.pdf (2,800 kb)

Comments deadline: July 31, 2009

FRSAD is the new name for FRSAR, just as FRAD started as FRANAR, Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records. Which you can now hold in your hands, because Functional Requirements for Authority Data is finished and now in book form.

This book represents one portion of the extension and expansion of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. FRBR has been published as Nr 19 in the present Series. It contains a further analysis of attributes of various entities that are the centre of focus for authority data (persons, families, corporate bodies, works, expressions, manifestations, items, concepts, objects, events, and places), the name by which these entities are known, and the controlled access points created by cataloguers for them. The conceptual model describes the attributes of these entities and the relationships between them.

It costs €69.95 or USD $84 for North Americans.

There are no links on IFLA’s site to a downloadable FRAD, and there’s no mention of the FRSAD draft. The FRSAD group is hosting the draft on their own web site. Neither group announced their news on the FRBR mailing list. I’m bewildered. I assume the final FRAD text will be available to download soon. Open access to FRBR was a major contributor to its success.

• University of Toronto Libraries, which I think is the third biggest university library system in North America, launched their new Endeca-based catalogue. Congratulations to them for doing a very nice job. Alastair Boyd, head of cataloguing, said they did FRBRization at the Expression level, not the Work level. His example was a search for ariadne auf naxos, where you can see the libretto and score with multiple Manifestations underneath each.
• IFLA Cataloguing Section’s Annual Report 2008 (74 KB PDF). They’re the people from whom FRBR, FRAD, and FRSAR emerged. The minutes of the meetings in Québec City in August 2008 (244 KB PDF) are up too. (I thought they were new but I noticed I linked to them last November.)
• Xiaoming Liu posted about Guessing Publisher from ISBN Prefix, a new addition to xISBN.

Back in August I posted notes on what I saw at the IFLA 2008 conference in Quebec City. The official minutes of all of the Cataloguing Section meetings (244 KB PDF) are now online. It tells you what happened at all of the meetings (including the FRBR, FRSAR and FRAD meetings), who was there, and how they’re getting along doing what’s set out in their strategic plan.

I didn’t get to the pre-IFLA conference about Resource Description and Access, but now I can see what I missed: the presentations are up on the Joint Steering Committee web site.

Gordon Dunsire’s RDA Vocabularies and Concepts (114 KB PDF) will be of particular interest to people interested in RDF, the Semantic Web, SKOS, etc. Have a look.

My colleague Tim Knight posted his impressions of the event on the York University cataloguers’ blog after he got back.

Tuesday morning last week I went by the VTLS booth in the exhibit hall at the IFLA 2008 conference. What a friendly bunch of people they are! They did a demonstration of their new FRBRization service, which I posted about a couple of weeks ago. It’s very interesting and I was impressed. I took a few pictures and I’ll go through what they showed and tell you what I remember of it.

You run a library. You have your catalogue on the web. (If you use VTLS’s catalogue front-end, Virtua, you can do all the following stuff yourself. If you run some other system, you’ll link out to VTLS’s web site to make things work.) Let’s say you search for adventures of tom sawyer. You get the usual list of results; in this case, three books were found.

Notice the “FRBR Display: See related information (FRBR)” link. Forget about the wording, the important thing is what you see when you follow the link

This shows a work-expression-manifestation display. The adventures of Tom Sawyer - Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 (highlighted) says what the work is. (There shouldn’t be a plus sign beside it, because there’s nothing to expand, and the things below it should be indented, but that’s a minor presentation thing so overlook that.)

There are two expressions: non-musical recording - English and Books - English. The first expression has one item each of two manifestations, one on CD and one on cassette. The second expression is the written text of the work, and there are five items of print manifestations. Books. The catalogue found three different copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, representing three manifestations, but this FRBRizing tool found two more that have different titles.

All of this was automatially done by VTLS’s FRBRizing algorithm, they said. They can take a set of MARC records and run through them looking at the 008 field, titles, uniform titles, main entry, author entries, everything, the more the better, and pull out the works, expressions, and manifestations. From what they said this Tom Sawyer example came from real data from real catalogues.

Clicking on one of the manifestation titles changes what’s displayed on the right-hand side of the screen, as I recall. The full MARC view is turned on above, but it could show the information in the usual online catalogue format, and link back to the original library’s catalogue to the user can place a hold etc.

You can see how it would be possible to put a “Get any copy” button at the expression level. If someone wants to read Tom Sawyer and they want to read it as soon as possible, then the system can find the first available item of that expression and give it to them. There’s no need why the user should have to check all five manifestations to see where an item is free.

VTLS makes MARC records for the work, expression, and manifesation. Here’s a view of the hierarchy breakdown for Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. You can see the name of the work at the top, and then lots of expressions, each identified by the orchestra and conductor. (Performance date could go hear too.) One of the expression views is expanded and you can see three manifestations are listed: the LP, the cassette, and the CD.

FRBR really does work well for music, as this shows. In the box in the bottom half of the screen is the MARC record for the work itself, Symphony No. 6. There’s a 240 Uniform Title field, but not the 245 Title Statement, because that belongs to the manifestation. They’ve put in a local field, a 990, saying “Work,” and the 999s are other local fields, I assume holding information about the FRBRized view.

This is a new service they’re offering. I asked if it would be possible to get them to FRBRize my catalogue and then have my system use web services on their servers to get the FRBR information when I need it, and they said sure, that’d be possible if people wanted it. With that a library wouldn’t have to send users from their own catalogue to VTLS’s web site, it could grab the information as it needed it (in XML, JSON, whatever) and display it locally to the user.

It occurs to me as I write that if libraries had this interface made and then opened up their data to everyone, so we could all see what manifestations went with what expressions and works, we’d all be better off. We’ll see. Until then, keep an eye out for people starting to use VTLS’s service. It looks like the best vendor implementation out there. I thank them for showing it to me, and congratulate them on their hard work.

Thursday, the last day of programming at IFLA 2008, was when the Working Group on Aggregates met. Ed O’Neill of OCLC is the chair, and there were six others at the table, including Barbara Tillett and Judy Kuhagen of the Library of Congress. The three of them were the most active in the discussion, though I think Maja Žumer would have spoken up too had she been there. About a dozen people watched, most of whom I recognized from earlier FR* meetings.

There were three handouts for group members, and, generously, we observers all got a copy. The discussion centred around two things on the agenda, so I’ll just summarize what was said. No decision was reached, so there’s no official answer on how FRBR will handle aggregates yet.

Here are the “data model principles” that had been set out in some earlier discussions to help test the three ways of modelling aggregates;

• Inheritance: Properties (attributes and relationships) are inherited by subordinate entities (children) from superior entities. The properties of a work are inherited by its expressions; the properties of an expression are inherited by its manifestations; and the properties of a manifestation are inherited by its items.
• Universality: If an entity is a work in any of its manifestations, it must be a work in all of its manifestations. [O'Neill explained: the criteria for deciding if something is a work shouldn't depend on its manifestation.]
• Distinctness: A non-aggregate work is the smallest distinct and autonomous entity.

After that they got on to the three models they had been considering:

• Work-of-Parts Model: The aggregate as a whole is a work; individual components are simply parts of the work. [Tillett pointed out that "component" already means "component work" in FRBR and they didn't want to confuse the terminology.]
• Manifestation-of-Works Model: The manifestation is an aggregate of works and may include an “aggregating” work.
• Work-of-Works Model: Aggregates are works that are comprised of other works.

No-one had any other models to consider, and nobody there thought the first one was valid, so it came down to Manifestation-of-Works (with O’Neill as main advocate) vs. Work-of-Works (with Tillett as main advocate).

A few points from the discussion:

• Tillett said inheritance holds down through Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item, but there’s no inheritance between Works in the Work-of-Works model. There is a Work-to-Work relation (whole-part, sequential, etc.) between them, with no inheritance happening.
• There’s a difference between an aggregate that’s an augmentation, for example adding an introduction to a novel, and one that’s a collection, for example putting the three novels of a trilogy together into one book. Kuhagen made the distinction between pre-formed and post-formed collections, where the difference is when the decision to make the collection was made.
• But none of that matters for this discussion, Tillett said, and she said something she repeated a few times through the meeting: FRBR is meant to work at a high conceptual level, and not get into applications. (Applications as in “the model applied to this situation,” not application as in “computer software.”) FRBR should only think about aggregates in general, any kind of aggregate, and not worry what type an aggregate is. That level of detail belongs in applications of the model, where people can make their own local rules and interpretations.
• O’Neill said there would probably eventually be a subclassing of aggregates, because they are not all the same. This could be done in a FRBRoo way.
• What if in different applications of FRBR there are different rules about what a work is? O’Neill asked. How can we share information if we don’t agree on what a work is? “We can link it,” Tillett said. She agreed that something could be a work in one application but not in another, though theoretically it really is a work.
• O’Neill said that many things are works don’t need to be recognized as such, for example a very short introduction to a book. But that’s a local implementation decision, and if the introduction were to be recognized, it would have to be recognized as a work of its own. Everyone agreed on that. The universality rule was reworded to use “can be” instead of must: “If an entity is a work in any of its manifestations, it can be a work in all of its manifestations.”
• There was some discussion about the distinctness principle and whether it begged the question of an aggregate being a work of works. They all went to a draft report and looked at something and clarified that a list was ORed, not ANDed.
• In the end only the distinctness criteria was seen as useful: inheritance doesn’t apply to Work-of-Works and universality as modified is a given so it’s not useful as a test.
• They got into a metaphor next to think about an “aggregating work.” Take Patrick Le Boeuf’s special FRBR issue of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, which contained articles by many people. It was also released as a book. O’Neill said each chapter is an independent work, but Le Boeuf’s role as an editor is that of an aggregator. Each article is like a brick, and Le Boeuf’s intellectual contribution was to make the mortar that holds all of the bricks together into a new work. That mortar is an “aggregating work.” The aggregate work is the whole wall of bricks and mortar.
• Tillett said there was no need for this. The articles and the books are all just works, and they are related to each other. That’s all.
• Gordon Dunsire spoke up from the audience with an objection to this “aggregating work” idea, I think saying that if you take three bricks and put them together with mortar and call that new thing a brick, then you have bricks containing bricks, and it gets recursive and you get into problems. You can’t have a brick containing other bricks. (This reminded me of Russell’s paradox.)

Eventually they decided on a bake-off. They would take some examples and represent them using both the Manifestation-of-Works model (O’Neill and Žumer) and the Work-of-Works model (Tillett and Kuhagen). They would look at those and decide what to recommend as the amendment to FRBR. The examples will be: a collection of music by Sibelius (based on an example Eeva Murtomaa brought), an augmented version of Humphry Clinker (with an introduction, illustrations, that kind of thing), Le Boeuf’s FBBR journal issue/book, and a moving image to be decided (I’d guess a DVD with extras). In order to have this all done by next year’s conference in Milan they need to have the recommendation done for February, so they’re going to get the modelling done before October.

This working group meeting was really lively and fun to watch. I’m glad I went.

Late in the afternoon two days ago, Wednesday 13 August, was the second meeting of the FRBR Review Group here at IFLA 2008. I had to work on some unexpected stuff with a York colleague so I missed the first half hour of the meeting. When I arrived, back in the same room as the first meeting and the FRSAR meeting had been and the WG on Aggregates meeting would be, there were six people at the table (Patricia Riva chair) and fifteen observers.

They were talking about FRBRoo, “F – R – B – R – O – O” as most of them called it, but “furburroo” as I call it. A few scattered points I jotted down :

• Something (I missed what) in FRBRoo means that until at least one expression exists, the work does not exist. That clarifies an existing philosophical problem.
• Riva noted that really all manifestations are aggregates: the dust jacket design, the author photograph, etc., are all additions to the core. (The relative importance of those additions is another matter, as the Working Group on Aggregates discussed the next day.)
• In the FRBRoo mappings, Corporate Body in FRBR is matched up with Group in CRM. They are different, though, and some things are groups that aren’t considered corporate bodies in the library world. Something may get subclassed.
• There was more discussion about FRBRoo, remaining work to be done, what will happen next, etc. and general agreement that it, and object orientation, are not simple to understand.
• They will look into the possibility of working with the archives community.
• Riva pointed out something that Robert Maxwell noted in his book. The definition of the Person entity (3.2.5 in FRBR) says, “For the purposes of this study persons are treated as entities only to the extent that they are involved in the creation or realization of a work (e.g., as authors, composers, artists, editors, translators, directors, performers, etc.), or are the subject of a work (e.g., as the subject of a biographical or autobiographical work, of a history, etc.).” According to that there’s no place for a Person as producer of a Manifestation or owner of an Item. Corporate Body has the same note. There seemed to be general agreement that this was wrong.
• Maja Žumer pointed out that FRBR, FRAD, and FRSAR don’t or won’t all perfectly match up. People who implement them will find problems. How to keep up with all of that? Things are in flux, but people are getting on and building FRBR implementations even though there are known problems and some work still being done. Some discussion about that. There are organizational issues within IFLA about who reports to who and ho the different groups are organized and which reports to what.

More to come about the Working Group on Aggregates meeting the next day.