The FRBR Blog

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.

Last week Talisman Rob Styles posted MARC, RDF and FRBR, two initialisms and an acronym that probably get your heart racing like they do mine. In it, he points to a paper he wrote with fellow Talismen Danny Ayers and Nadeem Shabir: Semantic MARC, MARC 21 and the Semantic Web (440 KB PDF),

Abstract: The MARC standard for exchanging bibliographic data has been in use for several decades and is used by major libraries worldwide. This paper discusses the possibilities of representing the most prevalent form of MARC, MARC21, as RDF for the Semantic Web, and aims to understand the tradeoffs, if any, resulting from transforming the data. Critically our approach goes beyond a simple transliteration of the MARC21 record syntax to develop rich semantic descriptions of the varied things which may be described using bibliographic records. We present an algorithmic approach for consistently generating URIs from textual data, discuss the algorithmic matching of author names and suggest how RDF generated from MARC records may be linked to other data sources on the Web.

Thom Hickey, of OCLC renown, left a comment.

Earlier this month Jennifer Koerber reported on Bill Moen’s talk on The Future of MARC at a conference.

That comes out of the MARC Content Designation Utilization project, which Moen and Shawne Miksa are running. They’ve put up some information up about the Extent of Support for FRBR User Tasks. Interesting.

William Moen was mentioned here last September in another post about the user tasks.

Trond Aalberg, Frank Berg Haugen, and Ole Husby have a paper up (behind a pay-wall, sadly): A Tool for Converting from MARC to FRBR.

Abstract: The FRBR model is by many considered to be an important contribution to the next generation of bibliographic catalogues, but a major challenge for the library community is how to use this model on already existing MARC-based bibliographic catalogues. This problem requires a solution for the interpretation and conversion of MARC records, and a tool for this kind of conversion is developed as a part of the Norwegian BIBSYS FRBR project. The tool is based on a systematic approach to the interpretation and conversion process and is designed to be adaptable to the rules applied in different catalogues.

There’s more on this undated page also called A Tool for Converting from MARC to FRBR, by Aalberg solo. It links to a page written in Norwegian and containing a Java applet. Since I can’t read Norwegian and haven’t managed to get Firefox to run Java, I have no clue what’s going on there. I don’t have access to the paper, either, so I’m pretty much in the dark about all of this. If I find out more, I’ll post about it. If you’ve read the paper, feel free to leave a comment and clue me in. Just so you don’t go away completely unfulfilled, here’s a link to BIBSYS, “a leading supplier in Norway of information systems to libraries and institutions of higher education.”

UPDATE: I’ve read the paper. Here’s how they’re doing it:

The process outlined above is implemented in our conversion tool by the use of XSLT — the W3C language for transforming XML. Each entity case is coded as a template following the same control structure, and XPATH expressions are used for the various conditions and selections that need to be applied. The tool reads MARC-records encoded in the MarcXchange XML-format and produces a record for each entity in a format that extends the MarcXchange with FRBR type attributes and a relationship element.

They’re going to publish how they do the work, which will be great, but there are no algorithms or examples in this paper. They use the Library of Congress’s work on MARC and FRBR and cite OCLC’s Work-Set Algorithm.

An interesting development in mass FRBRization. I look forward learning more about it.

David Bigwood, who runs Catalogablog (a blog about cataloguing, as you might guess), gave a talk about MARC tools at a conference last November. He put up a recording of it, as well as the text.

• Free MARC Tools (text)
• Free MARC Tools (page at Ourmedia.org with embedded audio file and metadata)
• Free MARC Tools audio recording (8.7 MB MP3, 15 minutes long)

He discusses the Library of Congress’s FRBR Display Tool starting a little after the seven minute mark. (Of course, if you’re interested in free MARC tools, you’ll want to hear all of it.)

FRBR got a brief mention on the web4lib mailing list last week. There was some discussion of MARC, and Alexander Johannesen said in response to Walt Crawford:

There are a number of “semantically richer” library formats about, but my own investigations seems to find that they’re all basically someone thinking about a schema more than thinking about a datamodel that might fit some richer scheme. (The exception here is FRBR, which falls into the pit of “it’s only a datamodel” which a lot of people want to retrofit into MARC (!!).)

Datamining MARC to Find: FRBR?, by Knut Hegna (of the University of Oslo Library) and Eeva Murtomaa (of the Helsinki University Library), was presented at the 2002 IFLA conference in Glasgow. The abstract says:

In this project MARC data from two national bibliographies is analyzed in the light of the data model presented in the FRBR study from IFLA. The analysis shows that even though the information in the MARC records holds attributes relevant for identifying the work, expression and manifestation entities, the accuracy and formal syntax are too simple to be properly hand led by programs. Some of the results may be used to present better hit lists in OPACs. Two suggestions for OPAC user interface based on the ideas of the FRBR study and the results of the project are presented.