The FRBR Blog

Ingbert R. Floyd and Allen H. Renear’s What Exactly Is an Item in the Digital World? is up in their university’s repository. (”Institutional repositories,” for those of you unfamiliar with the term, are web sites where people can put stuff. Which is no big deal, except that they’re official and run by an institution — probably a university or its library — and there are probably more good intentions about putting stuff into them then actual stuff getting uploaded.) It’s a five-page paper but it says it’s a poster from the 2007 ASIST conference, so I don’t know. Floyd’s new to the blog but Renear’s been mentioned before.

ABSTRACT: IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is a model of the bibliographic universe. Although initially its application to the digital world appears to be straightforward, upon closer examination puzzles arise. One is that within the digital world it is surprisingly difficult to say exactly what FRBR items really are. On the one hand, the ontological candidates for items (concrete physical states of the computing system) are rarely identified and treated as items in practice — even though they may indeed be affirmed as items in theoretical discussions. On the other hand, objects that manifestly fail to meet the basic ontological criteria for FRBR items are commonly treated as if they are items. We describe this situation and, based on a re-factoring of FRBR into a set of roles (relationships) rather than a set of entity types explore two possible resolutions. One, favored by the second author, is consistent with ontology implicit in the original FRBR vision, but allows assignment of item attributes and roles to things that are not items; the other, favored by the first author, is a radical departure from the underlying FRBR ontology, but preserves the original attribute assignments and roles.

I don’t think Martha Yee (who did the Four Questions last year) will mind if I quote the entirety of her Wednesday e-mail to the FRBR mailing list:

In honor of Jimmy Durante (smile–see quote in signature below), all of my “What is a Work?” articles published in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly in 1994-1995 are now available at the UC eScholarship repository, as follows:

“What is a Work? Part 1, The User and the Objects of the Catalog.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1994; 19:1:9-28. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2709

“What is a Work? Part 2, The Anglo-American Cataloging Codes.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1994; 19:2:5-22. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2710

“What is a Work? Part 3, The Anglo-American Cataloging Codes, Continued.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1995; 20:1:25-45. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2755

“What is a Work? Part 4, Cataloging Theorists and a Definition.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1995; 20:2:3-23. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2711

Another relevant article that I wrote about FRBR-izing OCLC is available as well:

“Musical Works on OCLC, or, What if OCLC Were Actually to Become a Catalog?” Music Reference Services Quarterly 2002: 8:1:1-26. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2713

In addition, my recent article analyzing the differences among cataloging, metadata, descriptive bibliography, and abstracting and indexing services is now available:

“Cataloging Compared to Descriptive Bibliography, Abstracting and Indexing Services, and Metadata.” Invited for Ruth Carter festschrift, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 2007; 44:3/4:307-328. http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/2721

The Durante quote: “You have a dollar. I have a dollar. We swap. Now you have my dollar and I have your dollar. We are not better off. You have an idea. I have an idea. We swap. Now you have two ideas and I have two ideas. Both are richer. When you gave, you have. What I got, you did not lose. That’s cooperation.” (Yee cites Schnozzola by Gene Fowler, 1951.)

Preach it, Martha.

Last year I pointed out a paper by João Alberto de Oliveira Lima. Now his PhD thesis, Modelo Genérico de Relacionamentos na Organização da Informação Legislativa e Jurídica, is available online. It’s in Portuguese, but here’s the English abstract:

In most of the time information does not work in an isolate form and it always belongs to one context, making relationships with other entities. Legislative and legal information, in a certain way, is characterized by their high degree of relationships. Laws, bills, legal cases and doctrine are connected by several forms, creating a rich network of information. Efforts done for the organization of information generate artificial models that try to represent the real world, creating systems and schemes of concepts used in the classification processes and indexing of information resources. This research had the main objective of proposing a Generic Model of Relationship (GMR), based in a simple constructs which permitted the establishment of relationships between concepts and information units. In the conception of GMR were used Ingetraut Dahlberg’s Theory of Concept and the models CIDOC CRM (ISO 21.117:2006), FRBROO and Topic Maps (ISO 13.250:1999). The identification of relationship and the characteristics of information units in a legal domain were collected in the project “Coletânea Brasileira de Normas e Julgados de Telecomunicações”, using the methodology of Action Research. Besides the development of GMR and its application in the legislative and legal information domains, the research also contributed with the definitions of one identification system of documents versions and a new meaning for the term “information unit”.

Martha Yee has made The Concept of a Work for Moving Image Materials, her 1993 (hence pre-FRBR) paper, available. Abstract: “The concepts of work and related work as they apply to moving image works is discussed and recommendations made for their application to moving image materials.”

Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba, of the Kent State School of Library and Information Science, are running a three-year project on FRBR-Based Systems to Effectively Support User Tasks and Facilitate Information Seeking. They asked me to post this to you all:

Dear Colleagues:

During spring and early summer of 2007, we conducted a Delphi study on critical FRBR issues as part of an IMLS-funded project concerning the research and development of FRBR-based retrieval systems. We would like to share the major findings that are available at http://frbr.slis.kent.edu.

We hope the findings may contribute to the ongoing discussion on the recently released report by the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.

Sincerely,

Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba
School of Library and Information Science
Kent State University

I was part of the study and they sent me the report, but it’s not public yet. However, you can read these to see some of what they’ve found:

• Critical Issues and Challenges Facing FRBR Research and Practice (79 KB PDF) from that ASIST Bulletin issue last August
• Major Issues Facing FRBR Research and Practice Identified in a Delphi Study (49 KB PDF)

Work on the project continues, and they’ll be writing up more about the Delphi study. Interesting stuff.

Chris Oliver is head of Cataloguing Services at the McGill University Library in Montreal, and she’s also chair of the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, the alliteratively named “national advisory committee on matters of cataloguing and bibliographic control” that represents Canada at the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (and, formerly, on changes to AACR).

Feliciter is the magazine sent to members of the Canadian Library Association.

Chris Oliver + Feliciter 53:7 (2007) + Resource Description and Access = Changing to RDA (744 KB PDF).

The article caused some discussion on mailing lists and blogs. FRBR and FRAD are mentioned. I quote a four lines:

One of the most important documents for the library user is one that the user is probably totally unfamiliar with … This entity-relationship model, known as FRBR, focuses attention on how the data in records relates to what a user needs … FRBR has illuminated the deep bones of the bibliographic record and has underlined the centrality of the user’s needs. It has changed the perspective on cataloguing from a cataloguer looking at a record in isolation to a user seeking the record within the context of a large database or catalogue.

Christine Schwartz doesn’t like that line about the perspective: “I find this statement insulting.”

Cast your minds back, back, back into the mists of time, all the way to May 2006, and you may recall that I mentioned a North American Serials Interest Group conference where Steve Shadle and Paul Weiss did a talk on “FRBR In the Real World.”

Now it’s in print in The Serials Librarian 52: 1/2, May 2007: FRBR In the Real World.

Abstract: Brief refresher of the main aspects of the FRBR model, a review of various uses of FRBR, and a discussion of how the group 1 entity types apply in a serials context. We focus on levels (work/expression/ manifestation/item and whole/part), the number of entities in particular situations, and terminology. Examples of real-world serials are used to illustrate how the FRBR resource model applies to serials.

Here’s a short paper I just came across: National Libraries and the Semantic Web: Requirements and Applications, by Lars G. Svensson. (You may get a warning about an SSL certificate, but don’t fret.) It was given in February at the 2007 International Conference on Semantic Web and Digital Libraries in India.

A nice paragraph:

It has been pointed out, that permalinks from a single library only offers the possibility to comment on or tag a catalogue record from that library (Danowski, 2006). If, however, the library records relate to the national library’s authority record, comments and tags can be shared among instances of a particular publication. If the FRBR model is used, it will even be possible to differentiate the annotations between the physical items (“pp 50-55 are missing”), the manifestation (“a typographical error on p 238”), the expression (“the translator has totally misinterpreted the meaning of ‘synd om’”) or even complete works (“James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is hard to read”).

The Danowski cite is to Warum del.icio.us für Bibliothekskataloge untauglich ist. Google can translate that into English but it does a bad job of it.

Jodi Schneider pointed out something Allen Renear recommends: Implementing FRBR: A Comparison of Two Relational Models: IFLA’s FRBR Model and Taniguchi’s Expression-Prioritized Model (558 KB PDF), a 2004 master’s thesis by Einar Silset Berg.

ABSTRACT: Two relational data models are implemented and compared. One is based on the FRBR model proposed by the IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, and the other is based on a model proposed by Professor Shoichi Taniguchi, entitled ”the expression-prioritized model”. The two models’ abilities to handle documents that consist of different types of component parts are discussed. The bibliographic data from the discussed documents are filled into the databases and the physical consequences are discussed. The results show that the expression-prioritized model might be an improvement of the FRBR model. It gives a smaller database with less redundancy, yet it can reflect the same aspects of a document as the FRBR model.

Don’t miss this one, chums, it’s filled with good stuff and it’s freely available to all: the August/September 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2 MB PDF) has a special section on FRBR. It’s edited by Yin Zhang.

The contents are available individually in HTML or PDF:

• Introduction, by Zhang
• Introducing the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and Related IFLA Developments, by Pat Riva
• Understanding FRBR as a Conceptual Model: FRBR and the Bibliographic Universe, by Allyson Carlyle and Lisa M. Fusco
• From a Conceptual Model to Application and System Development, by Athena Salaba and Yin Zhang
• Understanding Support of FRBR’s Four User Tasks in MARC-Encoded Bibliographic Records, by Shawne D. Miksa
• FRBR: The End of the Road or a New Beginning, by Maja Žumer
• Critical Issues and Challenges Facing FRBR Research and Practice,
  Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba

Thanks to Gary Price and Glen Wiley for pointing it out.