The FRBR Blog

From the Library of Congress’s Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, or WoGroFuBiCo as the world knows it now, comes the final version of the report the draft of which we all read in December: On the Record (441 KB PDF).

Janet Swan Hill, one of the WoGroFuBiCo leaders, sent this to AUTOCAT:

The LC Working Group is on the brink of submitting its final report to LC. Please note that the final tally was more than 100 single-spaced pages of comments from the public about the draft. We all read every comment, and every single one was considered.

Both arising from comments, and arising from the continuation of work we had already contemplated, the final report will contain some substantive changes from the draft, including some additional recommendations, and some modified recommendations.

The report may be available prior to your leaving for ALA. If so, I urge you to read it, and as you discuss it with your colleagues, be sure that you are both referring to the final report rather than to the draft.

Many comments had to do with people wishing or believing that the report was something that it is not. For example, the report is not an implementation plan, and so it did not contain recommendations regarding “how”, “when”, “in what order”, and “with what money.” Implementation comes AFTER the recommendation itself is accepted, and must be dealt with then. A newly-added executive summary contains some clarification about the scope and limitations of the report.

Similarly, some comments were received about matters that are outside the WG charge (for example the status of LC as not a national library). In these cases, the WG did a “reality check”, to determine whether indeed the matters did not belong in this report.

Many comments were received that had the WG saying “didn’t we say that?” or “we didn’t say that, did we?” and comments such as these had us re-examining our wording to make sure that it adequately conveyed what we intended.

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to read the draft and comment.

I haven’t yet checked if the FRBR-related recommendations changed.

Comments on the draft report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control were due on Saturday. I didn’t send one in. I was out last Wednesday for a lively discussion at the pub with some very good cataloguers, and we discussed writing up our talk into a submission, but in the end only Tim Knight sent in comments.

There have been lots of comments elsewhere, from people you know like Tim Spalding, Karen Schneider, Jonathan Rochkind, Lorcan Dempsey and Karen Calhoun from OCLC, Roy Tennant, and more. Karen Schneider posted her comments and has been adding links to others she sees. The wogrofubico tag has been catching on, too. Heh.

The brouhaha is dying down. The Working Group will be busy over the holidays, I imagine, reading comments, thinking about them, talking them over, and polishing their draft into the final report. It’s due in January. I’ll post more then about what it says related to FRBR. Until then, the WoGroFuBiConess level will be fairly low here, unless something wild happens.

FRBR-related discussion has exploded because of the report from the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. I can’t possibly keep up with it all, so here are some good places to go to see what people are saying, and have your own say:

Mailing lists: RDA-L, AUTOCAT (Gmane archive), NGC4LIB, possibly the FRBR mailing list which has been dormant for a while.

Web sites: These two aggregators will catch a lot: Planet Code4lib and Planet Cataloging. (There’s some overlap between them; this blog is on both.)

I’ll link to things of special interest over the next while, and perhaps try to post some batches of links. Right now, you’ll want to see Diane Hillmann’s comments on the WoGroFuBiCo report.

Add a comment if there’s another good place to keep up with all the excitement.

Here are the parts of the 30 November 2007 draft of the Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control that mention FRBR (slightly adjusted by converting footnotes into hyperlinks). I won’t be able to keep up with all of the discussion that’ll be going on over the next couple of weeks (while comments are accepted) and after, but I’ll link to what I can. Personally, I think the recommendations in 4.2 are very sensible, though they should be directed to All, not just the Library of Congress, IFLA, OCLC, and vendors. I don’t know enough about RDA (I haven’t been reading all the drafts) to have much of an opinion about 3.2.

4.2 Realization of FRBR

Since the 1998 publication of the final report of IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Record (FRBR) study, the FRBR framework has served as an international catalyst for reconceptualizing bibliographic data and bibliographic relationships. FRBR suggests alternatives for analyzing intellectual content for bibliographic control.

Recent data modeling exercises in library and other arenas (FRBR, CIDOC CRM, <indecs>) have provided sophisticated models that highlight important areas for attention. At the same time, the emergence of resource-oriented architectures in the Web environment has made the bibliographic community alert to the benefits of providing access to data resources using simple Web-based protocols and schema. The combination of these two strands suggests an important future direction for the Library of Congress and for Web-based, network-level bibliographic control. The Working Group envisions a bibliographic infrastructure wherein data about entities of interest (e.g., works, places, people, concepts, and chronological periods) are encoded in agreed-upon ways and made available through agreed-upon Web protocols for ready and efficient use by other applications and services. LC and the library community need to find ways of “releasing the value” of the rich historic investment in semantic data onto the Web.

System implementations experimenting with the FRBR “Work” concept to cluster materials in the user interface are proving the value of the model at the Work definition level. However, clustering at the Work level exercises only a minor part of the FRBR model, which redefines the full range of bibliographic entities and their relationships (e.g., creators, producers, and subjects). At the same time, the impact of the FRBR model on cataloging practice and on the machine-readable bibliographic record has not been extensively explored. There is no standard way to exchange Work-based data, and no cataloging rules that yet support the creation of records using the FRBR model.

The work of the Joint Steering Committee to ready RDA for publication in 2009 is using FRBR for guidance. Unfortunately, that means that RDA is being based on a framework that has not yet received substantial testing on live data, in real libraries, at scale. The Working Group feels strongly that until FRBR has been tested, it will not be possible to usefully evaluate its applicability in the context of RDA.

Consequences of Maintaining the Status Quo

The library community is basing its future cataloging rules on a framework that it has only barely begun to explore. Until carefully tested as a model for bibliographic data formation, FRBR must be seen as a theoretical model whose practical implementation and its attendant costs are still unknown.

Recommendations

4.2.1 Develop Test Plan for FRBR

4.2.1.1 LC, OCLC, IFLA Working Group, and Representative System Vendors: Identify what agreements are necessary to support Work-based views in bibliographic systems.

4.2.1.2 LC, OCLC, IFLA Working Group, and Representative System Vendors: Develop and agree upon a schema for the exchange of Work-based data.

4.2.1.3 LC, OCLC, IFLA Working Group, and Representative System Vendors: Clarify the status of the Expression entity and, if appropriate, carry out work similar to that described in 4.2.1.1 and 4.2.1.2 for that entity.

4.2.1.4 LC, OCLC, IFLA Working Group, and Representative System Vendors: Use the results of the above activity as the basis for promulgating and evaluating FRBR implementations.

Desired Outcomes

The study, refinement, and validation of FRBR will provide a more robust framework for the creation of the resource description and access rules that will be used in the future to support a broad range of relational searching options. The final product will be a bibliographic environment with clearly defined elements and relationships that can be used in a variety of bibliographic control situations.

And from earlier in the report:

3.2 Standards

… The standards processes for the library community take place in a variety of organizations which sometimes have overlapping participants. In particular, the FRBR and RDA initiatives are currently moving forward within different organizational structures—to the extent that they are moving forward. Because the Library of Congress is a major player in both efforts it could well use its influence to help coordinate these initiatives more closely and to introduce a stronger cost/benefit perspective into the work. Over and above our concerns about RDA development proceeding in parallel with FRBR and its related activities (themselves still evolving), the Working Group has additional concerns about RDA, including:

• the promised benefits of RDA are not discernable in the drafts seen to date;
• unclearness on how metadata created according to RDA will align with existing metadata;
• the business case for moving to RDA has not been made satisfactorily; and
• the financial implications (both actual and opportunity) of adoption in term of changes to workflow and supporting systems may prove considerable.

[Consequences section omitted]

Recommendations

3.2.1 Suspend Work on RDA

3.2.1.1 JSC: Suspend further new work on RDA until:

• more, large-scale testing of FRBR has been carried out against real cataloging data, and the results of those tests have been analyzed (see 4.2.1 below);
• the use and business cases for moving to RDA have been satisfactorily articulated; and
• the presumed benefits of RDA have been convincingly demonstrated.

3.2.1.2 LC, JSC, and DCMI: Work jointly to specify and commission exploratory work to model and represent a Bibliographic Description Vocabulary, drawing on the work of FRBR and RDA, the Dublin Core Abstract Model, and appropriate semantic Web technologies (e.g., SKOS). Some preparation for this work has already been done in joint discussion of JSC and DCMI.

The draft report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control is out! Comments are open until 15 December, and the group says it will submit the final report to the Library of Congress by 9 January 2008.

• Introductory letter from the Working Group (46 KB PDF)
• Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control (30 November 2007 draft) (314 KB PDF)

It’s taken a while to recover from the wild excitement of the week before last, what with the RDA announcement and the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. The draft of their report will be out later this week and I’ll definitely link to it, but so will practically every other library blog in existence, so don’t worry that it’s going to sneak by you.

I listened to the WoGroFuBiCo webcast and it was fascinating. Excellent stuff, quickly and efficiently told. I look forward to the report, but I recommend the webcast to you too. If you have access to a Unix/Linux command line, you can convert the RealVideo stream to an MP3 with these commands:

mplayer rtsp://rmserv1.loc.gov/avloc04/071113lis1330.rm -ao pcm:file=wogrofubico.wav
lame -b 32 wogrofubico.wav wogrofubico.mp3

That’s what I did, and at the 61 minute mark I heard the summary of recommendation 4.2, about FRBR: “Immediately … develop a comprehensive test plan for FRBR…. Until these tests are completed and until the results have been analyzed, we recommend that the Joint Steering Committee temporarily suspend further new work on the development of RDA.” The full explanation is longer, of course, but instead of transcribing it we can wait a few days to read the whole thing in the report.

Around 74 minutes Barbara Tillett, who works at the Library of Congress and is one of the people working on RDA, comments that a lot of what was recommended the Library of Congress is already doing. She doesn’t mention the recent change in approach at RDA, but her question and the responses are very interesting listening.

Exciting times in cataloguing!

The Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control’s webcast (Real Video, 88 minutes), is now available online. If you missed it before, now you can see it at your leisure. I haven’t watched it yet, but I’ve read some the discussion about it.

Janet Hill on AUTOCAT, in Working Group Report/Meeting, sent a lengthy and informative post, ending with:

One of the things that we have tried to do in this report, is to provide both a vision of a future, AND to recommend things that need to be done in the interim. In other words, we aren’t recommending implementation of a future that isn’t here yet. I suspect that there will be very few recommendations that cause much angst in any quarter. The only recommendation that might cause a stir was our recommendation to suspend further developmental work on RDA until after FRBR has been more adequately tested on real data and the results of those tests can be analyzed.

Ed Jones asks:

Isn’t this a chicken-and-egg question? If work on RDA is suspended, then we’ve lost the most useful instrument for testing the FRBR model on real data. I can see how one might want to postpone implementation of RDA until it could be demonstrated that the FRBR model, as expressed in RDA, was a viable basis for organizing bibliographic metadata (which might or might not mean postponing beyond 2009), but I can’t see how this entails suspending development work on RDA, especially in light of the results of the most recent JSC meeting (which seem aimed at aligning RDA even more closely with FRBR/FRAD and ER/OO models).

Janet Hill responds:

You make a reasonable point, but all of us, even the most technologically oriented, and even those who were most likely to champion RDA, were in agreement that if (for example) there are some areas where systems can’t actually handle the concepts, it makes little sense to write a set of rules based on the assumption that system capability CAN. Further, as I noted in the presentation, although we connected our recommendation about RDA to FRBR testing, there were other areas of concern about RDA (which will get into the report), that JSC may be able to address while the FRBR testing is going on.

It may also be useful to know that we were not originally going to make this recommendation. Early on, our general thought was that we should recommend that FRBR and RDA be implemented as quickly as possible, that continued delay of what looked like the inevitable was creating difficulties in moving forward. It was only after considerable discussion as we actually put together our recommendations and saw how they were hanging together, that we realized that we needed to make the recommendation we did.

In the blog world, Karen Coyle posted her notes on the meeting, and you’ll want to read the whole thing, but I’ll just pick out one recommendation she mentions:

4.2 Realize FRBR. The framework known as FRBR has great potential but so far is untested. It is being used as the basis for RDA, even though FRBR itself is not clearly understood. The working group recommends that no further work be done on RDA until= there has been more investigation of FRBR and the basis it provides for bibliographic metadata. [Note: this recommendation is likely to change such that there will be specific recommendations relating to RDA; FRBR will be treated separately.]

How this will fit together with the decision to redo Resource Description and Access and base it much more closely on FRBR and FRAD, I don’t know. Both groups were working simultaneously and I don’t know how much interplay there was or how much each knew what the other was thinking.

Planet Cataloging will pick up lots more posts about this. That’s where I saw Laura J. Smart’s LoC Future of Bibliographic Control and RDA:

Building a de-facto standard based upon a conceptual model which isn’t clearly understood seems kind of bass-ackward. Is it realistic, however, to wait for FRBR to be better understood? We’ve had it for almost a decade. Let me play devil’s advocate for a second. If a conceptual model is difficult to understand than maybe it’s not a very good model? It’s one argument for a do-over on writing RDA.

On Monday I pointed out the much-anticipated webcast from the Library of Congress’s Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.

The webcast was so popular that no-one was actually able to see it. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth on AUTOCAT, and Christine Schwartz’s holiday was ruined. Naturally I attribute much of the interest to the possibility that FRBR would be mentioned.

An archived video of the presentation will go online soon, and the report itself will be available on 30 November. I’ll report on any mentions of FRBR, FRAD, or FRSAR.

The Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control is issuing its draft report tomorrow, and you can watch it on a live webcast at 1:30 PM EST. It’ll be open for comments until 15 December. I’m sure FRBR will be mentioned somewhere.

(The Pride and Prejudice example took longer than expected to recreate and document, but it should be up tomorrow.)

Structures and Standards for Bibliographic Data, the second meeting of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (WoGroFuBiCo) took place last Wednesday. Naturally FRBR came up, along with lots of other issues, so here are a few links to get you started.

• Mark Lindner’s LC Working Group - Structures and Standards, Part 1 - Welcome is the first of a series of blog posts reporting on what the speakers said that way. Work your way through.
• Diane Hillmann’s slides for her talk Structures and Standards for Our Bibliographic Future are up.