The FRBR Blog

The RDA-L mailing list is now being nicely archived on the web. You can browse through by thread or date. A good thread to look at, if you’re not on the list, is Cataloger Scenarios Added to Wiki.

Cataloger Scenarios from the DCMI/RDA Task Group (which Karen Coyle mentioned last week, because she’s part of it) is good reading.

These scenarios are intended to assist catalogers in visualizing how their work might flow in a setting that used RDA Vocabularies and FRBR relationships. The goal here is just to show how these packages of information might fit together and how catalogers can use their knowledge and experience in different contexts.

The fourth one, where a film cataloguer faces two DVDs with different versions of John Ford’s The Iron Horse, is a riot.

She also has to link to the Ford at Fox set somehow for the series. Jane thinks this is manifestation information, and is unsure how the linkage will work between individually cataloged manifestations and the set, which presumably has work, expression, and manifestation records.

Jane has now spent two days cataloging this resource. Her boss calls her into her office to explain why she should spend so much time and money playing with her records when they could just outsource it to India. Jane goes back to her desk and looks at the next time in her pile, which is a videodisc containing 30 short films by filmmaker Dennis Oppenheim. The one under that is a disc 60 short animated films by a variety of people she’s never heard of. Next is the second volume with another 60 films. She contemplates the idea of work records for these, then goes home and slits her wrists.

The Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA posted a set of working documents on Monday: “Please note that these documents are being made available as a means of providing outreach to both library and non-library resource description communities and assisting the Joint Steering Committee in its work.” I take this to be a response to the WoGroFuBiCo recommendation that all work on RDA be suspended immediately: the Joint Steering Committee posted its revised strategic plan (41 KB PDF), which outlines exactly how it plans to keep on working.

A dozen documents are posted, but of particular interest here are the RDA to FRAD mapping (43 KB PDF) and the RDA to FRBR mapping (53 KB PDF). The latter “shows how each RDA element relates to the attributes and relationships defined in FRBR.

(Thanks for Catalogablog for the pointer.)

Michael Gorman (see also his Wikipedia entry) is one of the towering figures in modern cataloguing. I recommend his book Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century, and don’t miss a chance to hear him talk about the subject, either. Of course, if you’ve done any cataloguing then you know his work on Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules.

Every now and then Gorman gets his ginger up and says something lively. His new comments on Resource Description and Access (85 KB PDF) are available online.

Lastly, there is the attachment on the part of the theoreticians to the document Functional requirements for bibliographic records (acronymized to FRBR). FRBR may have some merit as a way of looking at the theory of cataloguing—it has little as a foundational document for creating a cataloguing code. Never mind that the structure of bibliographic records set out in AACR2/ISBD is well established, accepted by scholars and other catalogue users for decades, and with minor flaws in concept and expression that could easily be corrected—it works in practice, but does it work in theory?

Outcomes of the Meeting of the Joint Steering Committee [for the Development of RDA] Held in Chicago, USA, 15-20 October 2007 shows the committee’s response to the feedback it’s been getting about the structure of Resource Description and Access. I quote at length to reflect the increased FRBRosity:

At the meeting, the JSC agreed on a new organization for RDA. This organization was suggested by the Editor based on the following concerns expressed by the constituencies:

• That the organization of RDA was too closely based on current database structures of linked bibliographic and authority records,
  when the ultimate aim is a relational / object-oriented database structure [ACOC].
  (See 5JSC/Editor/2 for details of the database implementation scenarios.)
• That organization of RDA is insufficiently aligned with Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) [ALA].
• That the inclusion of relationships between works and expressions in Part A, Chapter 7, is inappropriate [LC].

The new organization relates data elements more closely to both FRBR entities and user tasks.The existing Part A and Part B will be replaced by ten sections which fall into two groups, focusing on recording the attributes of each of the FRBR entities and on recording relationships between these entities, respectively:

Recording attributes

Section 1 – Recording attributes of manifestation and item
Section 2 – Recording attributes of work and expression
Section 3 – Recording attributes of person, family, and corporate body
Section 4 – Recording attributes of concept, object, event, and place

Recording relationships

Section 5 – Recording primary relationships between work, expression, manifestation, and item
Section 6 – Recording relationships to persons, families, and corporate bodies associated with a resource
Section 7 – Recording relationships to concepts, objects, events, and places associated with a work
Section 8 – Recording relationships between works, expressions, manifestations and items
Section 9 – Recording relationships between persons, families, and corporate bodies
Section 10 – Recording relationships between concepts, objects, events, and places

Each section will contain a chapter of general guidelines and chapters for the entities. Each chapter will be associated with one of the FRBR user tasks and one or more FRBR entities; for example, chapter 2 in section 1 will cover elements primarily used to identify a manifestation or item and chapter 19 in section 6 will cover elements primarily used to find a work. The chapters on recording attributes and relationships for the FRBR group 3 entities (concept, object, event, and place) will be placeholders, provided to allow a complete mapping to FRBR and FRAD and as a template for possible future development of RDA to cover these entities. Instructions on recording the attributes and relationships for places have been included,
but will not initially go beyond the scope of AACR2 chapter 23.

Very interesting! “Each chapter will be associated with one of the FRBR user tasks and one or more FRBR entities” sounds like a great approach, and completely different from AACR.

Mark Lindner regularly posts on his blog Off the Mark about what he’s been reading. In Some Things Read This Week, 21-27 October 2007 (I’m still catching up on old posts), he points out “Tomorrow Never Knows:” The End of Cataloguing? (337 KB PDF) by Alan Danskin, a paper given at the IFLA 2007 conference in Seoul.

Lindner comments:

I agree that this is an important argument to make but we are in such an awful situation to make it currently. I wonder to what extent this is being fixed in RDA. I’m not too hopeful really. Tillett’s relationships made it into the RDA to FRBR mapping and they say a mapping of RDA to FRAD is due.

But these sorts of relationships and mappings cannot be afterthoughts if they are to work as they should; they must be integral to the system from the beginning. Even if they are being added mid-way that is not the same. JSC documentation says that they considered FRBR from the beginning. Perhaps. But the main problem is that FRBR (as a complete E-R model) is not complete. Both FRBR and RDA is being done piecemeal. And we are to get a coherent system from that process?

Go down into the comments at the bottom of the page for some more 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.”

Christine Schwartz blogs at Cataloging Futures. She’s planning on doing some posts on the new RDA draft and FRBR, and she started yesterday with RDA Takes FRBR Seriously: Revised Chapter 6. She says “It’s thoroughly FRBRized,” and “Unfortunately, a heavy handed application of the FRBR conceptual model gives this chapter (and chapter 7) a theoretical tone. It’s hard to wade through and may be hard to apply on a day-to-day basis for cataloging/metadata creation.”

I’ll post links to any further FRBR-related stuff she posts, of course. You might want to follow it yourself, directly or through Planet Cataloging.

UPDATE: Today she’s posted RDA Takes FRBR Seriously: Revised Chapter 7.

Pardon me while I catch up on some of the things that happened over the last couple of weeks. You know how it is.

On 18 June 2007, Nathalie Schulz, secretary of the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, sent out e-mail to the RDA mailing list about a revised draft of chapters 6 and 7 and a revised scope document. She said, “For information, the RDA Scope and structure document has been revised and now has two accompanying documents, an RDA element analysis and an RDA to FRBR mapping.”

• RDA Scope and Structure (94 KB PDF)
• RDA Element Analysis (151 KB PDF)
• RDA to FRBR Mapping (65 KB PDF)

If you’re following FRBR and FRAD in RDA, you’ll want to read all of this. Comments?

Discussion of all of this will appear in the RDA mailing list June 2007 archive file sometime in July, if you who aren’t on the list want to read it.

The Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (as they will be known) had a meeting last month in Ottawa and the minutes and such are now available on their web site: Outcomes of the Meeting of the Joint Steering Committee Held in Ottawa, Canada, 16-20 April 2007. One of the outcomes is that they’re going to change their name. The committee is made up of cataloguers, and it’s amusing to wonder what implications of this action, cataloguing-wise, ran through their minds as they decided to change the name of their corporate body. Well, it’s somewhat amusing. I grant you it’s not as funny as the one about the man from Madras.

The meeting happened before the RDA/Dublin Core get-together in London and it mentions some preparation for that, along with much else.