The FRBR Blog

Bibliographic Control Alphabet Soup: AACR to RDA and Evolution of MARC is a 90-minute “webinar” (I hate that word) on Wednesday 14 October 2009. Starts at 1:30 pm Eastern (18:30 UTC). I thought it was free but it costs about $100, so there you go. If you can’t make it Wednesday you can still pay to watch it later.

Barbara Tillett is talking about AACR2, RDA, VIAF, and linked data; William Moen is talking about his research into MARC usage; and Diane Hillmann is talking about RDA elements and vocabularies and gets a bit FRBRy:

As the lynchpin of hugely successful efforts by libraries to provide information on their holdings to both local and remote users, MARC has had an illustrious presence. However, the format is beginning to fail libraries as many of our partners and potential partners in a greatly enriched information ecosystem do not “speak” MARC but handle their data in very different ways. RDA elements and vocabularies represent the distillation of library descriptive knowledge, optimized for use within an environment that speaks XML, RDF, and linked data, and which seek to express that knowledge in an FRBR-aware manner. This webinar will provide a brief overview of RDA elements and vocabularies.

(Via Christine Schwartz’s Cataloging Futures.)

The main announcement about this is a PDF (!?) so I’ll quote first from a news announcement from The DOI System (that’s Digital Object Identifiers) that has some links:

A new initiative, the Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF), has been announced by a consortium of partners. This will create an extensive and authoritative mapping of vocabularies from nine major content metadata standards, creating a downloadable tool to support interoperability across communities. The mapping will also be extensible to other standards. The work builds on the principles of interoperability established in the indecs Content Model, and is an expansion of the existing RDA/ONIX Framework into a comprehensive vocabulary of resource relators and categories, which will be a superset of those used in major standards from the publisher/producer, education and bibliographic/heritage communities.

The International DOI Foundation, which fully endorses this work, will provide a web hosting facility for the Framework as part of its commitment to promoting the wider use of interoperable metadata, and will use the vocabulary mapping wherever possible to support the association of metadata with DOI names.

For further information see:

• VMF project announcement, June 15, 2009.
• indecs Content Model
• RDA/ONIX Framework for resource categorization

The actual announcement begins:

Work is under way to create an extensive and authoritative mapping of vocabularies from major content metadata standards, creating a downloadable tool to support interoperability across communities.

The work is an expansion of the existing RDA/ONIX Framework into a comprehensive vocabulary of resource relators and categories, which will be a superset of those used in major standards from the publisher/producer, education and bibliographic/heritage communities (CIDOC CRM; DCMI; DDEX; DOI; FRBR; MARC21; LOM; ONIX; RDA – see reference section below for details).

The resulting tool will be known as the Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF).

Karen Coyle sent out some e-mail yesterday about two new Dublin Core documents she’d written:

The first document is one I worked on — painfully, I must say — that attempts to explain the DC concept of Application Profiles. These are concepts we want to apply in the DC/RDA work, and my personal question to you all is: DOES THIS MAKE SENSE? Can we use this in our metadata environment? What’s missing, what doesn’t work, what needs clarification?

The first one is Guidelines for Dublin Core Application Profiles (Working Draft), which she wrote with Thomas Baker.

When it comes to metadata, one size does not fit all. In fact, one size often does not even fit many. The metadata needs of particular communities and applications are very diverse. result is a great proliferation of metadata formats, even across applications that have metadata needs in common. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has addressed this providing a framework for designing a Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP) that meets specific application needs while providing semantic interoperability with other applications on the basis of globally defined vocabularies and models.

I like application profiles. They let you pick and choose from other metadata schemas so you have just what you need, and they let you add and change what you don’t want. And if someone says, “Hey, that’s not how MODS or CanCore do it,” you can say, “Get lost. I’m doing it my way, to serve local user needs.

Anyhoo, FRBR is mentioned in these guidelines, for example:

A set of functional requirements may include user tasks that must be supported such as the following from the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)

Use the data to find materials that correspond to the user’s stated search criteria.

Use the data retrieved to identify an entity.

For the MyBookCase DCAP our functional requirements are:

Use the data to retrieve books with a title search.

Limit a search to a particular language.

Sort retrieved items by publication date.

Find items about a given subject.

Describe the author as a person with a name and email address.

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.