The FRBR Blog

catprinciples.pbwiki.com was set up so that people could have early access to the final draft of the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (55 KB PDF). The document sets out the basic rules that IFLA says should underpin all cataloguing codes. It’s short, and the Statement is grounded in FRBR and FRAD. It’ll move to IFLA’s web site soon and I’ll post the fresh link.

The Statement of Principles – commonly known as the “Paris Principles” – was approved the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles in 1961. Its goal of serving as a for international standardization in cataloguing has certainly been achieved: most of the cataloguing codes that were developed worldwide since that time followed the Principles strictly, or at least to a high degree.

Over forty years later, having a common set of international cataloguing principles has become even more desirable as cataloguers and their clients use OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues) around the world. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, an effort has been made by IFLA to adapt the Paris Principles to objectives that are applicable to online library catalogues and beyond. The first of these objectives is to serve the convenience of the users of the catalogue.

These new principles replace and broaden 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.

… These new principles build on the great cataloguing traditions of the world, and also on the conceptual models of the IFLA documents Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD), which extend the Paris Principles to the realm of subject cataloguing.

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.

IFLA’s put up two versions — I leave it as an exercise for the reader to fully FRBRize what’s going on here — of the 2008 revision of the Final Report on FRBR. The HTML version includes all of the tables, and no longer makes you go to the PDF version to see them.

• 2008 revision of Final Report (HTML, multiple files)
• 2008 revision of Final Report (1.1 MB PDF)

IFLA has published a revised errata sheet, updated last month, for the FRBR Final Report. It corrects some small things.

Did you know that the Standing Committee of the IFLA Cataloguing Section has a newsletter called SCATNews? I didn’t. But thanks to Catalogablog I found the December 2007 issue of SCATNews (139 KB PDF), and there’s some FRBR (and FRAD and FRSAR) stuff in it, along with other international standards.

Page two says that the revisions to the definition of the Expression entity were accepted and will be published. The working group on aggregates is going to be at it for an extra two years because aggregates (things combined with, or containing, other things — think of all of the works in any issue of a newspaper or magazine, with all of those articles, photographs, cartoons, advertisements, etc.) are so confusing.

Page five has “What’s New with the FRBR Entity ‘Expresion’?” by Pat Riva and Anders Cato. I quote a bit of it:

Except for exact photographic reproductions, the only way to be absolutely positive that there are no tiny differences in the words contained in two different manifestations of the same textual work is to compare the two manifestations word-by-word. This is obviously something that is not going to happen in any normal cataloguing situation, with the unfortunate result that under a strict interpretation of the definition, the entity expression could never actually be applied, thus completely loosing [sic] its potential for organizing the displays of those works with many manifestations.

The revised version (a new expression!) isn’t on the web site yet, but it will replace the old version when it’s published.

Finally, on page seven Pat Riva (chair of the FRBR Review Group) reports that Ed O’Neill and Carol van Nuys left the Review Group when their terms ended, and Françoise Leresche (of the Bibliothèque nationale de France) and Eeva Murtomaa (who back in 2002 cowrote Data Mining MARC to Find: FRBR?) joined. Marg Stewart is the new liaison with the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA.

There’s so much FRBR news these days it’s hard to ration it out to one post a day. Coming up soon: Arlene Taylor’s collection Understanding FRBR is out, and Michael Gorman issued another broadside. But today, IFLA.

FRBR was created by the FRBR Working Group, which was formed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, or IFLA. (Why not IFLAI? Good question.) A couple of years ago, the Working Group became the FRBR Review Group. Its home page, or the FRBR Final Report itself, are what most people link to when they hyperlink “FRBR.”

But now there is a home page just for FRBR itself. It has links to the Final Report, translations (the FRBR term “expressions” being confusing to the average person), a basic reading list on FRBR, and the mailing list. If you need to hyperlink the term “FRBR,” this is a good place to link. Good work by Pat Riva (chair of the Review Group) and IFLA in setting this up.

(Thanks to David Bigwood at Catalogablog for the link.)

People all over the world are packing their suitcases and keeping a close eye on their passports and plane tickets: next week the 73rd IFLA General Conference and Council starts in Durban, South Africa. It runs from 19 - 23 August.

IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, is where FRBR was born. The FRBR Review Group will be meeting there, as will I believe the Working Group on FRAD and the Working Group on FRSAR.

If you have a look at the conference program, you’ll see that this Sunday, from 1:45 to 3:45 PM, under “Update on International Issues and Report on Bibliographic Control in Southern Africa,” Glenn Patton will be talking about FRAD and Marcia Zeng and Maja Žumer are talking about FRSAR, with Barbara Tillett giving the introduction.

I’ll be keeping an eye peeled for any news from the conference and will post here anything of interest. Drop me a note, or leave a comment, if you’re there and come across something we all should know. Next year the conference is in Quebec City, and I plan on going.

I hope everyone going has a good and productive time there.

This year’s International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions conference is in Durban, South Africa, 19-23 August. The FRBR Review Group will be meeting there, and when they post their reports and minutes I’ll let you know.

If you’re going to the conference, you may want to stick around an extra day for the Library and Information Association of South Africa’s Interest Group for Bibliographic Standards day of events where one of the speakers will be the tireless Barbara Tillett on Resource Description and Access and FRBR.

The Working Group on FRBR/CRM Dialogue has a page on IFLA’s web site now.

“CIDOC CRM is the conceptual reference model for museum information, expressed in object-oriented formalism,” it explains, in case you were wondering. FRBR and CIDOC people are working to make an object-oriented version of FRBR, called FRBRoo. You can download a draft of their work and see minutes of meetings on their web page. This is interesting work.

(Seen on Catalogablog.)

This blog mentioned the new definition of the expression entity at the end of September, but now it’s up at the IFLA web site: Invitation to Participate: World-Wide Review of Revisions to FRBR Section 3.2.2, Definition of the Entity Expression. It’s definitely worth reading, and if you have any comments, get them in by the end of the year.