The FRBR Blog

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.

• Edward Betts from the Open Library: Works pages live on Open Library staging. Openly accessibly work-manifestation groupings, with work identifiers. In test still. This is big. Here’s Murder On the Orient Express.
• Martin Malmsten, Making a Library Catalogue Part of the Semantic Web, from Proceedings of International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2008. Linked data! Here’s one edition of Murder On the Orient Express in Libris, Sweden’s national union catalogue. In the source is a linked to the same information RDF and you’ll notice “frbr-related” links to other records.
• The FRBRy Variations Digital Music Library System software is now available on Sourceforge! “Variations provides online access to streaming audio and scanned score images with a flexible access control framework to ensure respect for intellectual property. In addition to access tools, Variations also includes analysis and annotation tools useful in music teaching and learning. With Variations, institutions can digitize recordings and scores from their own collections and provide those materials to their students and faculty in support of teaching, learning, and research.”

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.)

Kathy Glennan, chair of the Music Library Association’s Bibliographic Control Committee, last week announced on the RDA-L mailing list:

The Music Library Association’s Bibliographic Control Committee (BCC) is pleased to announce the availability of the Final Report of The BCC Working Group on Work Records for Music (available at: http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/BCC/BCC-Historical/BCC2008/BCC2008WGWRM1.pdf). As BCC chair, I constituted this short-term working group in April, charging the seven members to look at the issues surrounding the question of what elements and attributes of musical works should be included in a work record, once the cataloging community moves beyond AACR2 and MARC21 to a new descriptive model that stores data in a relational or object-oriented database.

It’s a short report, nine pages plus a two page introduction. From the Discussion section towards the end:

As most musical works in the Western canon contain an internal structure (movements, arias, etc.), it is desirable, and indeed necessary, to describe this structure in the work record. Current authority record practice sanctions the creation of separate records for parts of larger works, when necessary for creating access points. The user then infers the whole/part relationship based on the syntax of these access points (e.g. “Zauberflöte. Hölle Rache” is a part of “Zauberflöte”).

In a relational database environment, such whole/part relationships can better be represented by dynamic relationships (expressed as links) between larger works and their parts. This is especially desirable when the parts have discrete attributes of their own (e.g. Variant titles, Keys).

Hey. How’s it going? I was on vacation for a while there, then taking a bit of a break while I got caught up on things at work, so I have a few things in the backlog here. Hope you had a good summer. (Or winter, if you’re in the southern hemisphere.) I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, in case you were wondering. Look for some news about a revived project soon.

Jenn Riley sent out this announcement late last week. Congratulations to them on getting funding for this project! If they do what they want to do, we’ll all benefit.

Indiana University is pleased to announce funding for a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for a project entitled “Variations as a Testbed for the FRBR Conceptual Model” <http://www.imls.gov/news/2008/091008a_list.shtm#IN>. This project will build on Indiana University’s expertise in digital music libraries and the well-known Variations digital music library system < http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/variations3/index.html>, and provide a concrete testbed for the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) conceptual model. This project is focused on testing FRBR in a real-world environment, and on providing data, code, and system design specifications that can be re-used by others interested in FRBR.

These are our primary planned project activities:

• Convert the production Variations system to use a FRBR-compliant data model
• Adjust our existing algorithm for use of MARC records to conform to the FRBR-compliant data model.
• Load FRBR Group 1, 2, and possibly 3 records for all score and recording holdings in the IU William and Gayle Cook Music Library (approximately 80,000 bibliographic records for audio recordings and 105,000 records for scores) into the redesigned system.
• Make FRBRized records available for community use via OAI-PMH, SRU, and batch download.
• Design and implement a new, openly-accessible search interface for discovering FRBRized data
• Design and implement a new cataloging system for FRBRized data that takes advantage of the distinction between the FRBR entities yet supports efficient data entry.
• Perform usability testing on the new end-user and cataloger interfaces to evaluate their effectiveness.

Our project expects to have the following concrete work products:

• A published FRBRization algorithm that operates on multi-Work Manifestations, and
  evaluation of its effectiveness
• A formal data model for FRBR, if none is available before our project begins
• FRBRized data made available to the community for further testing and analysis
• An openly-accessible system for searching FRBRized music data for community testing and analysis
• Usability evaluations of FRBR-based end-user discovery and cataloging systems
• Figures on the costs of creating FRBRized bibliographic data by both automated and
  manual means
• Source code for the Variations FRBR-based discovery system.

The three-year project will begin October 1, 2008. We look forward to starting work on this project, and sharing our progress widely.

Jenn Riley, the Inquiring Librarian, sent this around to some mailing lists yesterday. I’ve added in all the hyperlinks.

The Indiana University Variations2 and Variations3 projects use a work-based metadata model for discovery of musical sound recordings, scanned score images, and encoded score notation files. This model has been described as “FRBR-like” and is mentioned in various discussions of FRBR-based systems, but it is not technically a FRBR implementation.

As the project team investigates long-term sustainability issues for the Variations3 software, we have begun thinking about what a truly FRBR-ized version of the metadata model would look like, and if changing to this type of model would make our system more sustainable and interoperable. In September 2007 we released a report interpreting the FRBR Group 1 entities and their attributes for musical materials. Now, in July 2008, we have completed a second, follow-on report looking at the FRBR Group 2 and 3 entities and FRAD, and how they apply to musical materials. The report is available from our project news page: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/variations3/updates.html.

From the news page about Variations 3, “an integrated digital library and learning system for the music community:”

A new report, Definition of a FRBR-based Metadata Model for the Indiana University Variations3 Project, is now available for review. This report defines, for the purposes of discussion, what a FRBR-based metadata model for digital musical audio recordings, bitmapped score images, and encoded score notation would look like. Please send comments to Jenn Riley.

In an announcement sent to a mailing list for music librarians, Jenn Riley said, “The Indiana University Variations2 and Variations3 projects use a work-based metadata model for discovery of musical sound recordings, scanned score images, and encoded score notation files. This model has been described as ‘FRBR-like’ and is mentioned in various discussions of FRBR-based systems, but it is not technically a FRBR implementation.”

• Judith E. Bush’s 80 millionth OCLC Number and a Personal Refresher on FRBR mentions sheet music and a MIDI version of a musical work as different expressions. (She wonders if she’s right about that, and she is, as long as it neither has been put into physical form, in which case they become manifestations and items.)
• Mark Lindner’s And On a Related Topic … Fun in the Classroom describes what sounds like a great class discussion about unexpressed works and unrealized expressions. Then he gets into some thoughts about whether FRBR can handle imaginary works (such as Camel Ride to the Tomb by X. Trapnel or Match Me Such Marvel by St. John Clarke). On top of that, I’d add the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and ask how FRBR can handle works etc. that exist only in parallel universes (which would include all those imaginary works). (I think all cataloguing and classification systems should be able to handle things made by aliens or in parallel worlds. “The library is a growing organism.”)
• Deborah Kaplan’s LibraryThing and FRBR concerns, as you would expect, LibraryThing and FRBR.
• Abigail Bordeaux was at the Open Repositories conference and FRBR came up there, as she reports in Days 3 and 4: Sunny and Sixty. People said “copy” instead of “item.”
• A few weeks ago I mentioned Frédérick Giasson’s Music Ontology and now he’s made version 1.02 available.

Who Owns the Work?, a post on the Titles Varies Slightly blog, is a short piece pointing out the interesting job FRBR will have of dealing with the Beatles album Love, which uses parts of 130 different songs to make new remixes and mashups.

“Revolution Number Nine” would be hard to fully describe, too.

Frédérick Giasson posted Major Revision (1.01) of the Music Ontology on his blog on Saturday. If you’re interested in FRBR as applied to music, or the knottier questions of aggregate works, have a dekko.

The ontology took a major shift by its deep integration with the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) ontologies.

As you will see with the classes schemas bellow, all the MO classes related with music are sub classes of FRBR classes. The FRBR ontology is used as the basement of musical works. So as you will see, a mo:Album is a sub class of a mo:MusicalWork and this class is a sub class of the frbr:Work class. This means that an album is ultimately a work in the sense of the FRBR ontology.

He includes some sample SPARQL queries at the bottom. Check the comments, too.