The FRBR Blog

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.

The Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, or WoGroFuBiCo, is having their second meeting on 9 May in Chicago. The topic is “Structures and Standards for Bibliographic Data” and the agenda is up on their site. I’m sure FRBR and FRAD will be mentioned.

Christine Schwartz’s blog post First Meeting of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control has a fistful of useful links about the first meeting.

The WoGroFuBiCo, or Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (created by the Library of Congress), had a meeting last week at Google headquarters. (They wanted a meeting in California and Google offered the space.) FRBR came up during the day. If you’re interested in FRBR, you’ll want to follow this group, both for what they do and what people say they should be doing. Here are some relevant blog posts.

• Karen Coyle diligently took notes on all the talks and posted them on her blog. Start with Preamble: Users and Uses Meeting for some background and then work your way forward.
• Andrew Pace spoke, and posted on his blog in Bibliographic Control Meeting
• Talis’s Panlibus blog comments with The Future of Bibliographic Control… And the Pesky Users and Uses (and says FRBR is “a good enough idea, but insanely more complicated than is really required, and typically over-engineered”!)
• OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey was there and in LC WGFBC he says a longer post is forthcoming.

The Library of Congress has formed the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, or, as we’ll call them for short, the WoGroFuBiCo.

FRBR will be one of the things they look at and think about. The group is to “present findings on how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices can effectively support management of and access to library materials in the evolving information and technology environment,” “recommend ways in which the library community can collectively move toward achieving this vision,” and “advise the Library of Congress on its role and priorities.” One of the members of the group is Olivia Madison, who was chair of the FRBR group when their report was written.

The spring 2006 issue of CONSERline has a section on FRBR:

Our opportunities as serials specialists include working with developers of new systems to make use of FRBR for accurately displaying serial “families” of related serials and formats. The very thought provoking program on serials and FRBR at NASIG provided many ideas on how FRBR can be used to think through relationships between serials and displaying them to users, but more work is needed with its application to serials in evolving systems.

Regina Reynolds (LC) and Diane Boher (NLM) are co-chairs of the PCC group that developed basic record requirements for a serial in any format using FRBR user tasks. As part of the access level record for serials project, the group developed cataloging guidelines aimed at reducing redundancies, making fuller use of system-display capabilities, and providing for the possibility of vendor or publisher supplied data being added to records at a later time. A pilot study was conducted involving 13 institutions to compare records created at the access level with those created at a fuller level.

There’s more, with some links. CONSER works on cataloguing serials. Related link: CONSER Task Group on FRBR and Continuing Resources.

I linked to the draft version before, but now the final version is out: The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools (175 KB PDF) by Karen Calhoun of Cornell University Library, prepared for the Library of Congress.

As noted earlier, applying FRBR concepts to improve the user’s experience with catalogs was often mentioned by interviewees. Much is appearing in the library literature about deploying FRBR concepts [71, 72, 73, 74, 75]. There is excitement around the Research Library Group’s RedLightGreen [76] and OCLC’s work-based catalog investigations such as Curioser [77].

Feel the excitement!

It’s a great pleasure today to give you the Four FRBR Questions answered by Dr. Barbara B. Tillett, Chief of the Cataloging Policy and Support Office at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She’s been involved with FRBR for almost fifteen years now! For more about that and the rest of her career, read “An Interview with Barbara B. Tillett,” by Martin Kurth (Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 32 (3), 2001). I mention her a lot on this weblog because she’s very involved with FRBR and has spoken about it all over the world. She’s a member of (most pertinently here) the FRBR Review Group and the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR.

When did you first hear about FRBR?

In 1992 when I was asked to be a consultant to the Study Group on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records with Elaine Svenonius and Ben Tucker. Later Ben retired and Tom Delsey was brought on.

What’s your involvement with it now?

I continue on the FRBR Review Group and continue to speak about the conceptual model and its application to various things like serials, cataloging rules, authority control, other standards, etc.

What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?

Very loaded question as it assumes an FRBR world, which, if we had it, would be great and probably not need anything! But on the other hand if you mean what does the world need need with respect to FRBR organizing the descriptions of our resources and meeting user needs, it needs a great system to take full advantage of the FRBR model’s potential, making the data entry and maintenance simple and the user navigation and understanding intuitive.

What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?

FRBR is a model of the relationships among things libraries organize and is a listing of the essential information we use to find, identify, select, and obtain those things.