The FRBR Blog

Morbus Iff took an interest in FRBR a few years ago and began some work on it, making a start on a Drupal (a web site content management system) module that would use it: LibDB. As the datestamps show, he abandoned it, as often happens.

But he says, “I never stopped thinking about it.” In Drupal 7 and FRBR: A Mental Model, he puts down what he’s been thinking about regarding getting FRBR into the newest version of Drupal. (Which from what little I know is going to be really good.) It’s Drupal-heavy, so if you don’t use Drupal you might get confused.

Drupal 7 is “nearing” release and I’m once again thinking about FRBR. 7 now has the ability to add custom fields to its content types, functionality that previously required the contributed module CCK. While CCK, as a framework, had tons of additional third-party modules that mocked up different types of fields, Drupal 7 doesn’t, solely because it isn’t in the wild yet. I don’t consider this bad news, really, because I’ve always been of the opinion that most of the contributed modules available to Drupal are crap. They scratch itches, certainly, but very few of them are what I’d consider quality productions. So, for me, thinking about Drupal 7 and FRBR is thus constrained to “core” and “my own custom code”. Primarily, I’m interested to see just how much of FRBR could be modeled without custom code at all, so I’ve made some odd decisions to accentuate this. One could even accuse me of “just” making a boring old cataloguing system: regardless, I’m doing it with FRBR’s model fully in mind.

Some example ‘work’ level bib displays, says Lorcan Dempsey giving a link on Twitter, also posting Working on Works to his blog.

There is a significant – if little read – literature of cataloging theory. A recurrent theme is the balance between gathering like items, and discriminating between them. Managing similarity and difference in this way, and making sensible user interface choices, is not straightforward.

The FRBR model represents a recent approach to a part of this question: how to gather things that are in some way instances of the same intellectual work (a discretionary decision*), and how to distinguish sensibly between these things (critical editions, for e.g, or translations, etc).

… More recently, OCLC Research has been experimenting to see what data is available for display in a consolidated way at the work level. See a sample set of pages here, and some background detail here [pdf].

Sample work pages links has lots of things to examine, for example this Work-level view of To Kill a Mockingbird.

(That’s on frbr.oclc.org, an interesting hostname, but there’s no home page there.)

Mail from Simon Chambers:

Dear colleagues,

I’d like to announce the launch of a new FRBR-based online music catalogue at http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au, which presents the Australian Music Centre’s documentation of music by Australian composers and sound artists.

The catalogue adapts the basic FRBR framework to incorporate additional entities beyond traditional bibliographic records, and to support additional functionality such as retail sales. Thousands of sheet music and audio samples are available through the catalogue, which also integrates our calendar of events (concerts/gigs featuring works in the catalogue) and online magazine (featuring articles about the people/works/etc held in the catalogue). The collection was previously catalogued in a MARC based system using AACR2.

Feedback is most welcomed as we continue work on developing the user-interface (which is somewhat raw at the moment…) and continue to populate additional data.

Regards,
–
Simon Chambers
Online Manager, Australian Music Centre

Level 4, 10 Hickson Road, The Rocks NSW 2000 — PO Box N690, Grosvenor
Place NSW 1220
ph. (02) 9247 4677 — fax. (02) 9241 2873 —
http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au

There’s no mention of AC/DC in their system so I picked something at random: Alice, an orchestral work by Gillian Whitehead. The works page links to two “products,” a score and a CD recording. Those are both Manifestations but I don’t see the Expressions listed, perhaps because it’s a very simple case. Have a look around and see what you find.

• 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.

Quoting e-mail Jennifer Bowen sent around:

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project at the University of Rochester announces the release of a major white paper describing the project’s approach to metadata. The paper describes how the development of an XML schema for XC and the creation of a platform for enriching and transforming metadata (the XC Metadata Services Toolkit) benefit not only future users of the XC software, but also the broader library community.

“Supporting the eXtensible Catalog through Metadata Design and Services”
by Jennifer Bowen (Co-Principal Investigator, XC Project) is now
available at the project’s website at
http://www.extensiblecatalog.org/MetadataReports

The XC Schema is designed to enable the reuse of MARC catalog data alongside metadata from other metadata schemas within a variety of web environments. The schema’s FRBRized structure and inclusion of some RDA elements will provide libraries with an opportunity to work with metadata records that bear a strong resemblance to records that will eventually be created using RDA.

The XC Metadata Services Toolkit can be used to enrich, transform, manage and provide basic authority control for batches of metadata records in any XML schema, including MARCXML. It can provide a useful platform for testing new metadata standards and schemas and an invaluable learning environment for libraries as they become accustomed to new metadata standards such as RDA.

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) is a collaborative project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and by XC Partner institutions. The XC Software will be released later in 2009 under an open source license. More information about the XC Project is available at www.extensiblecatalog.org

Jennifer Bowen
eXtensible Catalog Project
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York

Jenn Riley sent MARC work identification algorithm specifications released to the Music Library Association mailing list yesterday:

The Indiana University Variations3 digital music library project has performed a series of experiments designed to maximize the information we can map to our work-based metadata model from MARC Bibliographic and Authority records. The biggest strength of our "batch loading" algorithm is better identification of Works that are represented in bibliographic records, especially in cases where one record represents *multiple* work. The output of our batch loading work is a full mapping from MARC to data that conforms to the current Variations work-based metadata model, although we will be updating our specifications to output fully FRBRized data in the future. The full current algorithm and supporting documents are now available at <http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/x/OQBGBQ>. We hope that even if they aren’t fully FRBRized yet they may be of use to others in the community looking to use MARC records for the basis of FRBRized systems.

The work to migrate these batch loading specifications will be done as part of the newly IMLS-funded Variations/FRBR project at Indiana University. More information on the Variations/FRBR project can be found at <http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/vfrbr/>.

Exciting stuff! I asked Jenn if they had any code to release — the programs they’d written to implement the algorithm — and she said not yet, but they would, along with more details about the XML representation of the data. Work is continuing, and this is definitely something to watch.

(Via Stacy Allison-Cassin.)

In April 2007 I wrote zmarc.rb, which took an ISBN and dumped out a MARC record for it. As part of OpenFRBR I did more work on it and now it’s isbn2marc. You may have better ways of getting MARC records, possibly not involving Z39.50, perhaps also in Ruby, but this does what I need for now. Patches welcome.

# USAGE
#
# isbn2marc [-q] [-d marcfile] [-x xmlfile] ISBN
#
# -q          Run quietly, don't list servers queried and don't
#             dump MARC to STDOUT
#             By default isbn2marc tells STDERR what it's doing
#
# -d marcfile Dump MARC record to file
#
# -x xmlfile  Dump MARCXML record to file

# EXAMPLES
#
# Find a MARC record for the first volume of Casanova's HISTORY OF
# MY LIFE and pretty print it:
#
# $ isbn2marc 0801856620
#
# Find a MARC record for Terry Pratchett's THIEF OF TIME and write
# a binary MARC file to disk as well as pretty printing it:
#
# $ isbn2marc -d thief.marc 0552148407
#
# Find a MARC record for the first omnibus volume of the University of
# Chicago Press's edition of Anthony Powell's A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME,
# but don't show the record on the screen:
#
# $ isbn2marc -q -d stringham.marc -x templer.xml 0226677141
#
# Find MARC records for all ISBNs in a file and save them on disk:
#
# $ cat isbns.txt
# 0439064864
# 0439064872
# 0439136350
# 0439136369
# 0439139600
# 059035342X
# 0736646736
# $ isbn2marc -f isbns.txt -d harry-potter.marc
#
# Find a MARC record but don't display it or save it:
#
# $ isbn2marc -q 0195024028
#
# You'd be a bit silly to run that often.

Norberto Manzanos announced that an English translation of his Spanish paper “El Impacto de FRBR en Argentina: Implementación de un Modelo de Objetos Basados en FRBR, CRM y FRBRoo en CAICYT-CONICET” is now online.

• El Impacto de FRBR en Argentina: Implementación de un Modelo de Objetos Basados en FRBR, CRM y FRBRoo en CAICYT-CONICET (356 KB PDF)
• The Impact of FRBR in Argentina: Implementation of a model based on FRBR-ER, CRM and FRBRoo at CAICYT-CONICET (101 KB PDF)

This article presents a computer science design for the registry of documentary material based on models FRBR-ER, CIDOC CRM and FRBR-OO that is being developed in CAICYT-CONICET. The proposal leaves from the first group of entities defined by the model FRBR-ER (Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item) and incorporates some of the proposals of the other two models. In general, it rescues of these the use of the paradigm of objects, which derives in a more rigorous definition of concepts. It takes from them, among other things, the modelization of events, which allows to represent documents in its temporary process. It to deepen in other aspects that not yet have been treated by FRBR-OO: the lack of exhaustive classification, ontológical status of the Item and its relation with the hardware, the problem of the responsibility and the function of the documentary person in charge and the problem of the names. Since the presented product is at the moment in use in CAICYT-CONICET’s data base of argentine ISSN, it is detailed which is the approach of the model to the problem of the series. Finally, some particularitities of the implementation are mentioned: use of the Smalltalk language, his dialect of opened code, Squeak, and frameworks independent that has been developed: Atón and Smallfaces.

Squeak! Cool.

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.

In Galen Charlton’s ALA 2008 Conference Notes: ALCTS FRBR Interest Group from late June, he said John Espley of VTLS had talked about an online FRBRization tool, designed be software as a service.

I e-mailed Espley to ask more about this, and he explained, and I quote:

The FRBR SaaS (Software as a Service) is as you wrote “new and experimental.” In summary, the way it will work is:

1. Non VTLS library extracts their bib records and sends them to VTLS Inc.
2. VTLS Inc. will analyze the records for potentially FRBR records.
3. The identified potentially FRBR records will be placed in a Virtua database and FRBRized.
4. Using “web services” (similar to how book jackets and other media are displayed in an OPAC) there will be a link on the records in the non VTLS library’s OPAC that will redirect the user to the FRBRized records in the Virtua database.
5. There will also be a link from the FRBRized records in the Virtua database back to the non VTLS Library’s OPAC.

This is all new, but expect to hear more about it as things develop. If you happen to be at the IFLA conference in Quebec City next week, look for the VTLS booth, where people can give a demo. How this will compare to xISBN and thingISBN will be interesting to see.

I’ll be at IFLA too, and I’m going to sit in on everything FRBR-related that I can. I’ll write about it here. I’m always glad to meet people that read this, so say hello.