The FRBR Blog

Sent by José Borbinha <jb@ist.utl.pt> to the FRBR mailing list today.)

This is an invitation to take part in an evaluation of an experiment in the TELplus project (http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/telplus)

Please evaluate the system described below and fill the questionnaire, according to the instructions.

The questionnaire is anonymous, and we estimate it can be answered in less than 5 minutes. However, it has to be preceded by a “test drive” with the system, which can take as long as you want…

We appreciate the answers to the questionnaire until the end of the day of December 16 (Wednesday), please!

For any further clarification, please feel free to email to
nuno.freire@bnportugal.pt [or] nuno.freire@bnportugal.pt.

Brief introduction

The aim of this task is to explore possible improvements for search in The European Library (http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org), under the assumption that a presentation of the results, following the general ideas of the FRBR model, could help.

Considering that The European Library amounts to about 150 million records in 32 different languages, this might have the potential to narrow down the search results by clustering similar records (including of multiple languages).

In order to evaluate that, we developed a case with a sample collection of the works of the Literature Nobel Prize winners. For that, we used records extracted from 11 libraries, thus with a high number of works with many translations in multiple languages. We are now inviting you to evaluate this system and answer to the questionnaire available at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TELplus_FRBR_Prototype

Description of the system

The system to experiment is available here:

http://digmap2.ist.utl.pt:8080/lgteFrbr/indexFrbrClustering.jsp

The system was prepared like this:

1- All the records were received in MARC21 or UNIMARC

2- All the records were transformed to the “TEL Application Profile” and indexed by a Search Engine, just like The European Library is doing nowadays

3- In parallel, all the records were also processed to build a new “FRBR database”, built according to a set of “FRBR motivated” rules that try to pre-build clusters according to what is perceived to be the same work.

The way the system works is like this:

1- Each search is first done by the Search Engine! But instead of presenting the results immediately…

2- …they are first sent to the FRBR database, which returns the same results but now grouped according to what this database already knows from the initial work’s clustering (this might comprise more records than those initially found by the search engine, and also might include enhancements in author’s names and dates). These are the results that finally are shown to the user!

For easy evaluation of the prototype, and answering the questionnaire, the search results can also be seen without the FRBR clustering at:

http://digmap2.ist.utl.pt:8080/lgteFrbr/indexFrbrLibrary.jsp

Important things to know in advance

- The unique purpose of this experiment is to explore new ways to present search results in order to help ANONYMOUS users to better find resources, AND NOT TO PROPOSE ANY “FRBR OPAC”!!! We only looked for inspiration in the main concepts of the FRBR model, and we never intended to build a formal FRBR database!!! In this sense, we are hiding from the presentation of results any reference to any FRBR concept, for not distracting/confusing the user.

- However, this prototype also is intended to mainly be evaluated by librarians or professionals with knowledge of the domain, so we also were not concerned in providing a “final product”. This means that the presentation of the results was decided with the main purpose of supporting evaluation, and not usability. For example, in order to see a specific record, we just present
the original MarcXchange record, and did not care to provide any other visualization…

- Please do not search with diacritics. For example, to search by
“L’étranger”, please use “L’etranger”. We found a problem with this in the last moment with the search engine that might be solved at any moment, but until there is remain an annoying limitation…

- This service is hosted in a “working server”, so you might experience a slow performance if too many users are trying it on the same time… If that occurs, sorry, but please be patient…

- After this evaluation we will produce a public document with the results, as also the detailed description of the architecture of the system and of the processes…

The collection

This collection contains 92.535 records extracted from the following Libraries:

- British Library
- French National Library
- German National Library
- National Library of Hungary
- National Library of Latvia
- National Library of Lithuania
- National Library of Portugal
- National Library of Serbia
- National Library of Spain
- National Library of the Czech Republic
- Russian State Library (only records from Russian authors)

- We also received a collection form the Royal Library of Belgium, but it was not possible to use it due to a detail in the records for which we had no time to adapt the FRBR system…

The generic criteria for extraction was “all the records where the author was a Literature Nobel Prize winner” (we got a lot, but as you can imagine, we also got some noise… we did not care too much about that, as we don’t think it was important…).

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Best Regards

José Borbinha (IST ~V INESC-ID)

Nuno Freire (National Library of Portugal)

FRBR: Things You Should Know, But Were Afraid to Ask was a talk Barbara Tillett gave at the Library of Congress in March and the video of it is now online.

This presentation for non-catalogers is intended to present basic concepts and benefits of using the FRBR conceptual model (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) in resource discovery systems.

I took an ISBN for a manifestation of Fifth Business, the great novel by Robertson Davies, and superduped it with my new superduping script. That left me with a list of ISBNs that xISBN and thingISBN think are other manifestations of the same work. I ran those ISBNs through isbn2marc and dumped out MARCXML. I ran that MARCXML through the LC FRBR Display Tool and ended up with an XML file that looks in part like this:

<work>
   <mods:name type="personal">
      <mods:namePart>Davies, Robertson</mods:namePart>
      <mods:role>
         <mods:text>creator</mods:text>
      </mods:role>
   </mods:name>
   <mods:titleInfo>
      <mods:title>World of wonders</mods:title>
   </mods:titleInfo>
   <expression>
      <mods:typeOfResource>text</mods:typeOfResource>
      <manifestation>
         <imprint>
            <mods:titleInfo>
               <mods:title>World of wonders</mods:title>
            </mods:titleInfo>
            <mods:note type="statement of responsiblity">Robertson Davies.</mods:note>
            <mods:originInfo>
               <mods:publisher>Penguin books</mods:publisher>
               <mods:dateIssued>1977</mods:dateIssued>
            </mods:originInfo>
            <mods:physicalDescription>
               <mods:extent>315 p ; 20 cm.</mods:extent>
            </mods:physicalDescription>
            <mods:identifier type="ISBN">0-14-016796-X (pbk)</mods:identifier>
         </imprint>
      </manifestation>
   </expression>
</work>

I wrote a script that reads that file, picks out the bits that OpenFRBR can use, and loads it up into the system. (script/runner lets you use the Rails environment from the command line.)

The results are on OpenFRBR now. I’m going to keep on this track for a bit to see how much I can get out of the LC tool and what bits are missing. I ran into some trouble along the way with character encodings but for now I just remove troublesome MARC records. Now I can go give Jodi Schneider’s paper a good read!

Jodi Schneider is one of the #code4lib regulars and an editor of the Code4Lib Journal. In May she did a paper for library school and a couple of nights ago she pointed it out to me in IRC: FRBRizing MARC Records with the FRBR Display Tool.

Who Should Read this Report

This paper is aimed at three audiences:

• Administrators who need to understand what FRBR is, how it benefits library users, and why trends towards increased digitization are making FRBRization even more important
• Researchers interested in automatic methods for FRBRizing MARC records
• Users of the FRBR Display Tool

I did some experimenting with the LC FRBR display tool last year, and am back doing more with it now, so I will read this with great interest!

It’s good to see library school students putting their papers online. I encourage all students to put their best papers on the web. Everybody benefits, especially the students.

I just got around to listening to Karen Coyle‘s talk at Code4Lib 2008: R & D: Can Resource Description Become Rigorous Data? It’s a great talk: she knows her stuff, enjoys a bit of sarcasm, and has important things to say. FRBR comes up here and there throughout her talk. Like the other talks at the conference, it was recorded, and the video is available at the Internet Archive.

Someone tagged Thursday’s Unshelved comic strip with frbr at Delicious. If you start at Monday’s strip you can see the whole week’s series, which are grounded in FRBR-based humour about the item entity.

(If the library has multiple copies of the book the woman wanted (multiple items of the same manifestation, probably), then why didn’t Dewey give one to her in the first place? Why say he’d reserve one if they were on the shelf?)

There’s an interesting thread on the ngc4lib mailing list, started by Tim (“Mr. LibraryThing”) Spalding’s Browsing percentages / analytics. The archive gets confused because some mailers break threading, but Dave Pattern follows up and says that by his measurements, in his library’s catalogue, 0.2% of people click on xISBN/thingISBN-generated related edition links. Jonathan Rochkind asks why Pattern dropped xISBN and went with thingISBN but, as I write this, Pattern is probably asleep and hasn’t replied yet. Jim Weinheimer mentioned the four user tasks.

Lars Aronsson sent an interesting e-mail to the ol-lib mailing list the other day. That’s where people talk about the librarianship aspects of Open Library.

Deadlock outlines a crazy chain of translations and adaptations of Sara Paretsky’s novel Deadlock. Things like that are good fun to consider in a FRBR way. “So this is an expression of that, and this is a whole new work, with these people and these corporate bodies involved …”

FRBRization is planned as part of The Open Library (just opened in demo mode) from the Internet Archive. This is wild stuff. Go look at it.

A weekend note about Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, which I’ve mentioned before. I hope to post a couple more things about it, so here’s something for future reference: Octavo make available a digitized copy of De Revolutionibus. Have a look.

I skimmed through a few pages and didn’t see any annotations, but I didn’t look at it all. This item comes from the Warnock Library in Oakland, California, and Gingerich’s Census will give full notes on it. The other books from their collection digitized at Octavo are by Newton, Ben Franklin, Dr. Johnson, Robert Hooke, and others.

The same pictures are available at Rare Book Room but the interface is a bit awkward and it will resize your browser window. Here’s De Revolutionibus at the Rare Book Room.

So, two identical copies of the same digitization of the same item. FRBRously intriguing.