The FRBR Blog

catprinciples.pbwiki.com was set up so that people could have early access to the final draft of the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (55 KB PDF). The document sets out the basic rules that IFLA says should underpin all cataloguing codes. It’s short, and the Statement is grounded in FRBR and FRAD. It’ll move to IFLA’s web site soon and I’ll post the fresh link.

The Statement of Principles – commonly known as the “Paris Principles” – was approved the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles in 1961. Its goal of serving as a for international standardization in cataloguing has certainly been achieved: most of the cataloguing codes that were developed worldwide since that time followed the Principles strictly, or at least to a high degree.

Over forty years later, having a common set of international cataloguing principles has become even more desirable as cataloguers and their clients use OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues) around the world. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, an effort has been made by IFLA to adapt the Paris Principles to objectives that are applicable to online library catalogues and beyond. The first of these objectives is to serve the convenience of the users of the catalogue.

These new principles replace and broaden the Paris Principles from just textual works to all types of materials and from just the choice and form of entry to all aspects of bibliographic and authority data used in library catalogues.

… These new principles build on the great cataloguing traditions of the world, and also on the conceptual models of the IFLA documents Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD), which extend the Paris Principles to the realm of subject cataloguing.

Pete Johnston the British metadata expert (not Pete Johnson the American boogie-woogie piano player, though metadata goes well with a left hand like God laying out eight to bar) posted Images DC Application Profile Working Group on Hallowe’en.

I haven’t really worked much with metadata for images, and I’m not that familiar with the models in use in that domain. Polly and Mick circulated a draft model based on the VRA Core, which made a primary distinction between the types/classes Work and Image. This prompted a good deal of discussion, both from the viewpoint of whether that model really addressed all the use cases at hand (e.g. Does it handle the “born-digital” case? And if a digital image in a scientific publication is generated from data, what is the (VRA Core) Work?), and also as to how well it “fitted with”/mapped to the FRBR model (on which the ePrints/SWAP profile was based)- the VRA Core concept of “Work” is not the same as the FRBR concept of the same name. This in turn raised the broader question of whether these various DC application profiles should be framed within some shared, over-arching model.

On re-reading the introduction to FRBR this morning, I note that the section on "Scope" does state:

The study endeavours to be comprehensive in terms of the variety of materials that are covered. The data included in the study pertain to textual, music, cartographic, audio-visual, graphic and three-dimensional materials

so at least some classes of image were considered as in scope by the developers of FRBR. I’d be interested to receive any pointers to/comments on any experiences of applying the FRBR model to graphical resources. I’ll forward any comments received here to the project.

I haven’t mentioned this before, and I’m not sure how I found out about it, but here’s a link: The Canonical Text Services Protocol.

The Canonical Text Services protocol defines a network service for identifying and working with texts. CTS joins the conceptual model of “texts” described by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (or FRBR) with a hierarchical model of canonical citations that is traditional in many areas of the humanities.

The Canonical Text Services protocol defines a hierarchical scheme of “works.” As in FRBR, the “work” is a conceptual entity: an abstract idea of the content expressed in all versions of a work, in the original language or in translation, but in CTS, the work’s original language is specified. CTS organizes works in “groups” that have no direct parallel in FRBR. Groups organize works according to traditional citation practice. They may reflect authorship (e.g., a work entitled Huckleberry Finn might belong to a group named “Mark Twain”), or may represent some other kind of corpus (e.g., a work numbered 1 belonging to a group named “Federalist Papers”). Works may include specific versions, called “expressions” in the FRBR model; in CTS, these are identified as either editions or translations, with language of translations explicitly identified. These expressions may in turn be represented by specific exemplars, or “items” in FRBR parlance.

Beyond identifying works, as the FRBR model aims to do, CTS provides a hierarchical model for citation of sections of a work. A prose work like Herodotus’ Histories might be organized in a book/chapter/section scheme, or an epic poem might be cited by book and line.

Karen Coyle sent out an announcement about Framework for a Bibliographic Future, which she’s created with Diane Hillmann, Paul Weiss, and Jonathan Rochkind. She says they “have been attempting to create what we think MAY be the kind of framework that we need in order to move forward with bibliographic data.” FRBR is mentioned therein.

Julie Allinson dropped me a note about an interesting project she’s working on. Eprints Application Profile desribes a plan to develop “a Dublin Core Application Profile for describing scholarly publications (eprints) held in institutional repositories.”

A page simply titled Model is a plan for representing all of these eprints, and it’s based on FRBR, with some adaptations to suit their purposes. Here’s something they’re pondering:

Issue: it is not clear whether the Powerpoint slides used to present a paper at a conference or workshop should be modelled as an Expression of the ScholarlyWork or as a new ScholarlyWork (i.e. as a separate work). If they are modelled sepearately, then it is likely that we will need a Work to Work relationship to capture the relation between a ‘publication’ ScholarlyWork and a ‘presentation’ ScholarlyWork.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops, how they handle all the problems particular to eprints, and then how it’s implemented.

UPDATE: Corrected spelling of Allinson’s last name on 4 February 2007. Sorry!

“FRBR/CRM harmonization” has been underway for a while. That’s a project to bring together FRBR and the Conceptual Reference Model of the Committee on Documentation of the International Council of Museums. It will present FRBR as an object-oriented model instead of the entity-relationship model used in the Final Report.

Patrick Le Boeuf announced that a draft of the FRBR/CRM report was done. It’ll be available publicly soon. I don’t know exactly when, but I’ll certainly post a link to it here.

The program for the 2006 CIDOC
(Committee on Documentation of the International Council of Museums) conference lists some FRBR-related activities. The program is in a tiny little box and hard to read on my web browser, but it may look better on yours. There will be talk about the FRBR-CRM harmonization that Patrick Le Boeuf and others have been working on.

Yann Nicolas, who wrote Folklore Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Oral Traditions and FRBR (Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 39 (3/4)), sent a pointer to the FRBR mailing list last week about TEF 2.0 - Thèses Electroniques de France (French Electronic Theses and Dissertations Metadata).

He said, “This metadata XML structure is based on a light conceptual model inspired by FRBR…. [W]e are working on an RDF encoding that will reuse Ian Davis’ and Richard Newman’s FRBR RDF schema.” It’s in French, but even if you don’t read French you’ll see from the illustrations what’s happening and how it’s FRBRy.

I’ve heard that the FRBR Review Group is about to announce plans for a major change to the FRBR model: they’re introducing a whole new entity called “quiddity.” There’s nothing on the FRBR Review Group’s web site or on the mailing list about this yet, but the former is rarely updated and the latter has had almost no traffic. When I hear something official, I”ll post more about it.

So, what does “quiddity” mean? My Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the essence of a person or thing; what makes a thing what it is..” The Oxford English Dictionary says, “the real nature or essence of a thing; that which makes a thing what it is.” Those are clear definitions, but I’m not sure how they apply here.

Quiddity falls between the two abstract entities (work and expression) and the two concrete entities (manifestation and item). One of the problems with FRBR has been the difficulty in deciding what makes a new expression instead of a new manifestation or a new work. We saw some examples of this in the Tolkien Middle-Earth challenge a few weeks ago. I think quiddity is supposed to make this easier because it straddles the abstract and the concrete and is sort of half of each: it is what makes something what it is, but you still can’t touch it.

A work is realized through an expression, and we used to say an expression is embodied in a manifestation, and then a manifestation is exemplified by an item. Now with quiddity added, it will be like this:

• A work is realized through an expression
• An expression is reified in a quiddity
• A quiddity is embodied in a manifestation
• A manifestation is exemplified by an item

“To reify” means to “convert (a concept, abstraction, etc.) into a thing; materialize” according to my Canadian Oxford Dictionary. The new terms are rather cryptic.

What would really help is some examples, but neither of the people that told me about this included any. I don’t understand it well enough yet to come up with any, but leave a comment if you know more about it and can give one. Personally, I thought the four entities covered everything nicely, even if expression did need a bit of clarification. Still, if adding quiddity clears that up (and maybe it will help with the aggregates problem, where there are several works and/or expressions (and/or quiddities, now) contained in a work), then that’s all for the good. I hope there’ll be a report on the FRBR Review Group’s site soon about all this.

From Invitation to: World-Wide review of ISBD(A): International Standard Bibliographic Description for Older Monographic Publications (Antiquarian) 2006 revision:

In the early 1990s, IFLA’s Division of Bibliographic Control set up a Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). Following adoption of the Study Group’s recommendations, the ISBD Review Group was charged to initiate a full-scale review of the ISBDs. The objective of this project was to ensure conformity between the provisions of the ISBDs and FRBR’s data requirements for the “basic level national bibliographic record” (BLNBR).

… Therefore, the main task in pursuing this revision project has entailed a close examination of the ISBD data elements that are mandatory to make optional those that are also optional in FRBR. (In no case is a data element mandatory in FRBR but optional in the ISBDs.)

The draft of the new revision is available and comments are accepted until 1 May 2006.