The FRBR Blog

MusicBrainz “is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site.” They’re collecting information about music so that your CDs and MP3s can be easily identified and tagged with correct information.

The MusicBrainz Wiki has lots of information for users and developers and so on, and there is a page about FRBR. Here’s s the history section:

Despite this spec being almost a decade old, nobody in the library world has really implemented it yet. It is on the verge of becoming the “flying car” of library catalogs, a utopian dream never fulfilled. The [WWW] Library of Congress catalog is still structured as a bunch of MARC records, which is little more than a 1960s digital equivalent of a 19th century card catalog. One reason for this delay is that FRBR doesn’t specify who is going to do the job, it only says how it ought to be done. (And then the Y2K bug and dotcom crisis got in between.) Traditionally every library has a catalog of the books it owns. The idea that information about books (bibliography) could be separated from the local inventory was all new to libraries in the 1960s, when cooperative institutions like OCLC were born. With time these co-ops have started to act more and more like private monopoly suppliers that libraries depend on but really hate. Here, have some bibliographic data, the first samples are free, then you have to pay your soul, and we will supply your institution for the rest of its life. Throw in a lifetime subscription to the Encyclopædia Britannica as well.

Enter the 21st century and Wikipedia. The common knowledge needs not be owned by a monopoly supplier. Every private music collector and library can keep their local inventory in the shape of links to existing, shared information at MusicBrainz. Find an error, fix it in the shared pool, not in your local inventory. This is how OCLC and Gracenote work. Except that no single entity owns Wikipedia or MusicBrainz, because the contents can be copied freely by anybody. This answers the who question.

Fortunately, Wikipedia and MusicBrainz were created not by the tired old people who wrote the FRBR specification, but by fresh minds from the filesharing generation. Even if this means some shortcomings in the initial data model (just albums, tracks, and artists), leaving plenty of room for improvement, the important difference is that they are getting the job done, as opposed to just theorizing about it.

The last section on the page is about applications in MusicBrainz, and anyone interested in FRBR and music will want to read it.

Clara Assunção is a Portugese librarian who wrote a dissertation about cataloguing music and in it discussed FRBR. She’s posted the abstract in English and Portuguese, and here’s the English version:

This study results from the knowledge of the insufficiency in standards and rules used for the identification and description of written musical documents. Enlightened by the new standard development, particularly the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and recent studies on the concept of a work and bibliographic relationships, it must achieve an equilibrium between the music cataloguing rules normally used on libraries, very generalist, and the rules usually used by musicologists for the description of the same documents, particularly RISM rules, very specific an inaccessible to a less specialized public. Some proposals are made in order to contribute to the handling of music by the current revisions of FRBR, ISBD(PM) and UNIMARC. The final result is intended to be a description model according to the practice and the spirit of library cataloguing, but detailed enough to result in a useful tool to musicians and musicologists. The model was tested in a sample of bibliographic records from the opera Lauriane, composed by Augusto Machado.

Jenn Riley (the Inquiring Librarian) presented a paper at a conference last year, and I just noticed it: Exploiting Musical Connections: A Proposal for Support of Work Relationships in a Digital Music Library (433 KB PDF). It was presented at ISMIR 2005: 6th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval.

ABSTRACT:

Musical works in the Western art music tradition exist in a complex, inter-related web. Works that are derivative or part of another work are common; however, most music information retrieval systems, including traditional library catalogs, don’t use these essential relationships to improve search results or provide information about them to end-users. As part of the NSF-funded Variations2 Digital Music Library project at Indiana University, we have developed a set of functional requirements defining how derivative and whole/part relationships between musical works should be acted upon in search results, and how these results should be displayed. This paper describes recent research into these relationships, provides examples why they are important in Western art music, outlines how Variations2 or any other music information retrieval system could use these relationships in matching user queries, and describes optimal displays of these relationships to end-users.

Naturally, she discusses FRBR. Variations2 has been mentioned here before; see that entry for links to papers and presentations about it.

FRBR will be of immense help in organizing music recordings and making them easy to access. A closely related implementation is Variations2, which “provides online access to selected recordings and scores from the Indiana University Cook Music Library for use by IU Bloomington students, faculty, and staff. ” The way it works is quite FRBRish, but unfortunately you can’t see it because it’s a restricted-access system that requires a special client. Jenn Riley, who works on it, is presenting a paper about it at a conference this summer and if it becomes available online I’ll link to it.

Further reading:

• From Abstract to Virtual Entities: Implementation of Work-Based Searching in a Multimedia Digital Library, by Mark Notess, Jenn Riley, and Harriet Hemmasi (2004). “Like FRBR, our system is work-centric, being influenced by the work of both Velucci [12] and Smiraglia [13]. We have implemented a digital music library, Variations2, based on that metadata model, have deployed the system in our music library, and have seen increasing usage over the past year and a half.” Includes screenshots.
• Papers and Presentations about Variations2