The FRBR Blog

Gary Price posted about this in June and pointed it out to me but I’m just getting to it now: Describing the World: Data Model Patterns, a 102 minute Library of Congress webcast done in March 2009. (I still haven’t watched it yet due to technical problems.)

Description: “When an organization is planning to develop or revise the automation of information processing, a typical first step is to analyze the underlying structure of its business. The ‘entity/relationship’ (or simply ‘data’) model is a good vehicle for doing this. What has been discovered over the years is that there are a number of structures that are universal and applicable to all kinds of organizations, both private and public. There are four fundamental categories: People and Organizations, Geography, Physical Resources and Activities and Events. Overlaying all of these are the topics of Accounting and Information Resources. This webcast will also relate this model to the Library of Congress Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).”

The speaker, David Hay, works at Capgemini Financial Services, not the sort of background one usually finds in people talking about FRBR.

Catching up on something from last month: Sharing Standards for Bibliographic Data Worldwide: An Overview of Changes in Cataloguing Practices, a talk by Barbara Tillett at the Atlantic Provinces Library Association Conference 2009 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Built on foundations established by the Anglo-American CataloguingRules (AACR), RDA (Resouce Description and Access) will provide a comprehensive set of guidelines and instructions on resource description and access covering all types of content and media. The new standard is being developed for use primarily in libraries, but consultations are being undertaken with othercommunities (archives, museums, publishers, etc.) in an effort to attain an effective level of alignment between RDA and the metadata standards used in those communities, increasing the ability to share metadata among diverse communities. Cataloguers aren’t the only professionals who will be affected by these new rules. Increasing the ability to share metadata outside of our own organizations and changing description and access rules will impact the entire information profession. Along with providing an overview of RDA and its underlying conceptual model (FRBR- Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), examples of how FRBR can benefit circulation, reference and serials will be explored.

Laurel Tarulli says it was a very good talk:

Not only did she explain RDA and FRBR in a way that made complete sense (and I’ve been to other RDA sessions), but she also touched on how this is something the entire profession needs to be paying attention to, not just cataloguers. This is interesting because, up until now, many librarians have brushed it aside as a cataloguing issue. Not so! How information is retrieved, what it will retrieve and how it is presented will all change. The relationship gathering is what really excites me. And, it should excite all librarians in and out of the cataloguing department.

As seen on Cataloging Futures, two Library of Congress webcasts of Barbara Tillett (who works there, she’s chief of the Cataloging Policy and Support Office) talking about Resource Description and Access:

• Resource Description and Access: Background / Overview (67 minutes, recorded 14 May 2008): “RDA (Resource Description and Access), the next generation cataloging code designed for the digital environment, is under development. This presentation provides background on its development and a general overview of the conceptual models, international principles, and structure of this new code.”
• Cataloging Principles and RDA: Resource Description and Access (49 minutes, recorded 10 June 2008): “The second in a series on RDA: Resource Description and Access, the next generation cataloging code designed for the digital environment. This presentation deals with the cataloging principles that have influenced the development of RDA; the challenges they present to the international sharing of bibliographic and authority data; and the challenges they present to the developers of RDA.”

Worth following LC webcasts aimed at librarians and archivists. Tim “Mr. LibraryThing” Spalding, the Zotero dudes, Erik Hatcher of Solr renown, David Weinberger, Jennifer Bowen, Deanna Marcum, Karen Coyle, hey, even my former library school dean Brian Cantwell Smith, they’re all there.

Now time for a bit of geekery so I keep up some Planet Code4Lib cred.

I’d rather listen to these talks than watch them, so I’ll do what I did with the WoGroFuBiCo webcast: use a couple of Unix programs to convert a RealAudio video to MP3. Here’s what I’ll do to listen to the Zotero talk with Dan Cohen and Trevor Owens:

First, I’ll look in the launch in a new window link for the video src link: rtsp://rmserv1.loc.gov/avloc03/070611ssc1330.rm URL. Those rtsp links are what I want. They may be linked directly on the page.

Next, run the streaming video through mplayer and strip out the audio and save it to a WAV file, then convert that to a low-fidelity MP3:

$ mplayer rtsp://rmserv1.loc.gov/avloc03/070611ssc1330.rm \
-ao pcm:file=zotero.wav
$ lame -b 32 zotero.wav zotero.mp3

If you have mplayer and lame you should be able to do the same, but getting them installed is up to you, I’m afraid.

I was on vacation for a bit, but now I’m back, and I’ll be catching up. (I almost have Ruby on Rails working on my Eee (which I like a lot, it’s great); when I do I plan to have some work to show.) But first, some nice things I’ve missed.

You remember WoGroFuBiCo and the interesting report they wrote. Well, Associate Librarian Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress wrote a 75-page response to WoGroFuBiCo’s report On The Record (441 KB PDF). Here are the FRBR-related bits for easy reference.

3.2.5 Suspend Work on RDA

3.2.5.1 JSC: Suspend further new development work on RDA until a) use and business cases for moving to RDA have been satisfactorily articulated, b) the presumed benefits of RDA have been demonstrated, and c) more, large-scale, comprehensive testing of FRBR as it relates to proposed provisions of RDA has been carried out against real cataloging data, and the results of those tests have been analyzed (see 4.2.1 below)

LC Response and Rationale

LC could not wait until June 1 to take action on this recommendation. In considering the three recommendations under 3.2.5, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Agricultural Library (NAL) met in March 2008 to discuss obstacles to development and implementation of RDA. At this meeting, LC, NAL, and NLM agreed to proceed jointly to develop, complete, test, analyze costs and benefits, and schedule a decision on implementation of RDA, an important international initiative. Testing will include usability testing by bibliographic access production staff as well as compatibility testing with existing records. The three national libraries issued a joint statement on May 1, 2008.

Action: Current

The three national libraries, in collaboration with others, are developing the appropriate tests of RDA.

Action: Planned

LC will carry out tests in 2009.

4.2.1 Develop Test Plan for FRBR

4.2.1.1 LC, OCLC, IFLA Working Group, and Representative Vendors: Identify what agreements are necessary to support FRBR in bibliographic systems, including the full range of entity relationships defined in the FRBR model.

LC Response and Rationale

Support. It is possible that RDA testing is the best, most feasible, and economical way to glean the information needed to achieve this, in collaboration with system vendors and OCLC.

Action: Current

LC, NAL, and NLM, will conduct usability and compatibility testing of RDA during 2009, before implementing the new code in production.

Action: Planned

LC recommends no further concrete steps until the community can examine the outcomes of the RDA testing.

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.

LC Response and Rationale

Support, since this is essential to a completely FRBR-based system.

Action: Current

LC has expended and continues to devote significant resources to the development of FRBR.

Action: Planned

LC recommends no further concrete steps until after results of RDA testing are examined.

4.2.1.3 LC, OCLC, IFLA Working Group, and Representative System Vendors: Verify the need to provide distinct metadata at the Expression level and, if appropriate, carry out work similar to that described in 4.2.1.1 and 4.2.1.2 for that entity.

LC Response and Rationale

Support; please see response under 4.2.1.1 and 4.2.1.2.

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.

LC Response and Rationale

Support, because FRBR promises improvements in the user experience of the catalog and greater success in finding, identifying, selecting, obtaining, and using library resources.

Action: Current

LC devotes significant resources to ongoing development of both FRBR and RDA and will be heavily involved in the testing of RDA planned for 2009.

Action: Planned

Use the outcomes of RDA testing to inform plans to promulgate and evaluate FRBR implementations.

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!