The FRBR Blog

Some example ‘work’ level bib displays, says Lorcan Dempsey giving a link on Twitter, also posting Working on Works to his blog.

There is a significant – if little read – literature of cataloging theory. A recurrent theme is the balance between gathering like items, and discriminating between them. Managing similarity and difference in this way, and making sensible user interface choices, is not straightforward.

The FRBR model represents a recent approach to a part of this question: how to gather things that are in some way instances of the same intellectual work (a discretionary decision*), and how to distinguish sensibly between these things (critical editions, for e.g, or translations, etc).

… More recently, OCLC Research has been experimenting to see what data is available for display in a consolidated way at the work level. See a sample set of pages here, and some background detail here [pdf].

Sample work pages links has lots of things to examine, for example this Work-level view of To Kill a Mockingbird.

(That’s on frbr.oclc.org, an interesting hostname, but there’s no home page there.)

OCLC Exposes Work Identifiers is how OCLC put it on Thursday and I couldn’t put it better.

OCLC has extended the xOCLCNUM API to include the OCLC work identifiers (OWIs) in addition to OCLC record identifiers (OCNs) that correspond to manifestations. For several years now, WorldCat has been organised according to the FRBR model[1] that allows grouping of various editions of publications (e.g. reprints, translations, performances, digitized copies) into works. Sometimes users require particular manifestations and sometimes not, so it is desirable to cater for both needs by allowing navigation from works to manifestations and vice versa.

Here’s the xOCLCNUM API for more.

OCLC’s Xiaoming Liu has added some new features to their xID services, of which xISBN is probably the most familiar. xISSN and xOCLCNUM both support some new information. Check his blog post for links to the API, etc.

There are a number of “This Week in ___” summaries out there. I’m behind on things, so I’m going to catch up on some old stuff. Call it “Last Week in FRBR.”

I’d like to change frbr.org into something involving other people. FRBR’s far more widely known and used now than it was in May 2005 when I started this blog. My interests have evolved and my work has changed. More on this in another post.

• Ed Summers, Work Identifers and the Web. “Both OCLC Worldcat and LibraryThing mint URIs for bibliographic works…. [T]he library community really does web identifiers for works–or more precisely web identifiers for human readable records about works. What’s missing (IMHO) is the ability to use that identifier to get back something meaningful for a machine.”
• Phil Barker, Identifiers for UK OER “Works.” “Would it be useful and feasible to have a single identifier to link together all the instances of a learning resource?”
• Xiaoming Liu, New xISBN Bookmarklets Supports Thousands of Libraries. “The previous xISBN bookmarket supports more than 300 libraries, however, the list was manually maintained and it’s challenging to keep these links up-to-date, By ingesting good Registry OPAC information into xISBN bookmarklet, we are able to support thousands more libraries in a more sustainable way.”
• Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba, FRBRizing Legacy Data: Issues and Challenges(1.1 MB PDF), slides from 24 January 2009 ALA Midwinter talk. As part of the Kent State FRBR project they took the OCLC FRBR Work-Set Algorithm, experimented with it, and hacked on it a bit.
• Alastair Miles, Re: datasets for testing rda at scale, from the DC-RDA mailing list archives. “This is just an update to say that I’ve converted the LOC/data to marc xml and from there to mods xml. My next step is do some analysis of the loc data in mods xml to get an overview of the elements used, then to try to design at least a partial mapping from mods xml to RDF using the RDA and FRBR schemas.”

Coming up: in a couple of weeks Jodi Schneider and I are giving a talk at Code4Lib 2009: “What We Talk About When We Talk About FRBR.” I’ll link to the video when it’s up.

• University of Toronto Libraries, which I think is the third biggest university library system in North America, launched their new Endeca-based catalogue. Congratulations to them for doing a very nice job. Alastair Boyd, head of cataloguing, said they did FRBRization at the Expression level, not the Work level. His example was a search for ariadne auf naxos, where you can see the libretto and score with multiple Manifestations underneath each.
• IFLA Cataloguing Section’s Annual Report 2008 (74 KB PDF). They’re the people from whom FRBR, FRAD, and FRSAR emerged. The minutes of the meetings in Québec City in August 2008 (244 KB PDF) are up too. (I thought they were new but I noticed I linked to them last November.)
• Xiaoming Liu posted about Guessing Publisher from ISBN Prefix, a new addition to xISBN.

A couple of recent posts from Xiaoming Liu, the fellow who looks after xISBN and those other useful services from OCLC:

• Support hathitrust.org in xOCLCNUM Service. “This feature is implemented in following way: a request can put an additional parameter ‘library=hathi’ in xOCLCNUM request, the service will only return records which [are] marked as free access in hathitrust.org.”
• Better Hyphen Support in xISBN Service. “When requested ISBN is hyphenated, the response ISBNs will be hyphenated as well; we also added additional method of explicitly hyphenating ISBNs.”

A brief pointer to Jonathan Rochkind’s OCLC, and What We Lose Without Openness (A True Story), talking about the closed nature of OCLC and how the xID services, like xISBN, would benefit from opening up the source and data:

But maybe someone else wanted to work on an algorithm for doing this. Maybe they come up with something good. Maybe they want to provide such a service. As test data for their development, and to make such a finished service useful, they’d need a big corpus, like, WorldCat. Maybe OCLC would give them permission to use the WorldCat corpus like that–if they are willing to sign away certain rights on what to do with it, and if OCLC doens’t think it threatens WorldCat’s business model. But even having to ask and negotiate is a barrier to agile experimentation and innovation–there are plenty of people doing interesting stuff with not enough time, they don’t have time for legal negotiations with OCLC, and shouldn’t need to engage in them, it doesn’t serve us.

Preach it. Xiaoming Liu’s doing a great job, but he’s just one programmer.

I met Xiaoming Liu at Access 2008 earlier this month. He works on xISBN, xISSN, xOCLCNUM, xTHIS and xTHAT from OCLC. It was nice to finally be able to talk to him in person after reading his e-mails for so long.

He sent mail to xidentifier-l with some updates about the services last week:

• xISBN supports original language field
• xISSN has better peer-review status data
• xOCLCNUM starts to support “ebook” and “oca” collections (that’s Open Content Alliance)
• And the price and policy pages were updated.

OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey posted Class Numbers on Works on his blog; he describes Classify, a new thing that tells you what call numbers have been assigned to a book.

Big deal, you say. But wait! What if it told you the call numbers assigned to a work? Aha! Now we’re talking FRBR. One work can have lots of different expressions and manifestations, but if they’re all the same work then they should end up classified the same. The more manifestations you can look up in WorldCat, the more data you have at hand, and that’s always useful.

For example, my copy of Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th edition), known to librarians as the APA Style Guide, has ISBN 1557987912.

The Classify listing for the APA Style Guide uses xISBN to find all the other known manifestations of this work, and then looks up information about them all in WorldCat, and shows it to you nicely summarized and with pretty pictures.

Pretty much everyone classifies this book in with psychology at BF 76.7 (Library of Congress Classification), but to me it’s a style guide, so I put it at Z 253.P83 so it’s collocated with MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (“the MLA”), A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (“Turabian”) and The Chicago Manual of Style (“Chicago”). It’s my library and I can do what I want. Serving the needs of the user!

Earlier this year some people (starting with Stuart Weibel, and then for example Scribe and Kathryn Greenhill) were talking about GLIMIR, OCLC‘s proposed Global Library Manifestation Identifier. It would, as you’ve already figured out, be a way of identifying manifestations. Usually people think of ISBNs as doing this, but publishers can do funny things and mistakes happen, and ISBNs have only been around for about forty years. A universally agreed-upon (well, even terrestrially would do) way of identifying manifestations would be useful. Of course, so would a way of unambiguously identifying works and expressions!

Anyhoo, I asked at the time if there was anything public about GLIMIR, and was told no. I haven’t heard anything more since then, and didn’t find any news after a bit of looking around. It was on my mind as something to follow up on, though, so this is a just a post about negative results.