The FRBR Blog

Dan Scott and Mike Rylander, who work on Evergreen, the open source integrated library system, pointed me at some discussion about oISBN: “I thought I’d go ahead and plug our xISBN-like service, called oISBN, that exposes the metarecords that our MARC fingerprinting algorithm creates.”

The link in the old blog post doesn’t work because it was on a test server, but this link for 0767886739 works and gives back some XML.

Nothing’s been done on this since, but if you want to help, you know where to download the source code and start hacking …

Last week Talisman Rob Styles posted MARC, RDF and FRBR, two initialisms and an acronym that probably get your heart racing like they do mine. In it, he points to a paper he wrote with fellow Talismen Danny Ayers and Nadeem Shabir: Semantic MARC, MARC 21 and the Semantic Web (440 KB PDF),

Abstract: The MARC standard for exchanging bibliographic data has been in use for several decades and is used by major libraries worldwide. This paper discusses the possibilities of representing the most prevalent form of MARC, MARC21, as RDF for the Semantic Web, and aims to understand the tradeoffs, if any, resulting from transforming the data. Critically our approach goes beyond a simple transliteration of the MARC21 record syntax to develop rich semantic descriptions of the varied things which may be described using bibliographic records. We present an algorithmic approach for consistently generating URIs from textual data, discuss the algorithmic matching of author names and suggest how RDF generated from MARC records may be linked to other data sources on the Web.

Thom Hickey, of OCLC renown, left a comment.

The AquaBrowser blog wrote up FRBR In AquaBrowser last month. “Several different FRBR techniques are being road-tested at new AquaBrowser sites. Do you have an opinion on the most beneficial approach?” Includes links to three sites doing FRBRy things inside AquaBrowser.

Says there that Bowker is selling access to “ISBN clusters,” much like, I presume, xISBN and thingISBN. Hmm!

Disintegration, disenchantment, distrust, and development by Candy Zemon, of the library system vendor Polaris, mentions FRBR briefly.

There is a bandwagon rolling about in email-list-land, the biblioblogosphere, conference presentations, and other library industry publications. It seems that the PAC (public catalog) sucks. And that putting lipstick on the pig (to quote Andrew Pace) doesn’t make it any more attractive.

I doubt you will find many folks who would argue much with the points made about particular public catalogs: that they are dull, jargon-laden, poorly designed, obscure, inconsistent in navigation, slow, labyrinthine, fragmented, usable only with a librarian’s point of view and expertise, complex, and downright unhelpful and obstructive.

… Open source software and people willing to use it are changing some of the ground rules. The importance of accessing information both inside and outside the library world means opening ourselves to more than one true data transmission protocol (our favored MARC). FRBR notions of data modeling force us to look at relationships and tasks as being critical to providing efficient information service. New technologies and new expectations of service across the entire range of our customer base stretch everyone’s notion of what a library could or should do.

A fortnight ago I made the rounds of the exhibit floor at the 2006 Ontario Library Association conference and asked some integrated library system/catalogue vendors about FRBR. A fellow at Innovative Interfaces said they’d been doing some work on it but then sort of pulled back, and were waiting, though they’d like to do more work on it if they could find someone to do it with. A woman at SirsiDynix took my card and said she’d have someone get in touch with me to give me an official answer. I’ll let you know when I hear more, from them or Innovative Interfaces.

I noticed a presentation at the 2005 ALA Midwinter that deserves a link. (I found it by checking on the FRBR tag at Delicious.)

John Espley, from the library system vendor VTLS, gave a presentation called FRBR and ERM: A Vendor’s Perspective (1 MB Power Point) at the Codified Innovations: Data Standards and Their Useful Applications session. The second half is about electronic resources management (subscription and access information to online journals). The first half, about FRBR, discusses continuing resources, in this case Atlantic Monthly and its name changes over the years, with lots of screenshots showing how its bibliographic history can be organized. On the conclusion slide one of his points is about “super works,” but as I recall the FRBR people have come down pretty strongly against this, saying that there are many groups of works, and lots of relationships between the works, but we shouldn’t confuse things by adding another level to the hierarchy and talking about super works. The Working Group on Aggregates will clear this up.

A quote from a press release titled Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium sees a VITAL solution for their digital repository needs:

Blacksburg, VA — VTLS is proud to announce that the Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium has purchased VITAL as their solution to provide a digital/institutional repository.

Serving as a test site for the 2.1 version in their use of this new ground breaking product, they joined an elite group of institutions around the world. No other repository solution offers the combination of rich functionality, vendor supported open source components and powerful workflow and search tools.

The Universite has a long tradition of being a pioneer in the use of cutting-edge automation products, having served as one of the first libraries to use VIRTUA and later the first site to run a production version of FRBR.

I’m not sure what they mean by “the first site to run a production version of FRBR.” I went to Catalogue des Bibliothèques de l’UCL and searched and looked at some Alexandre Dumas books, but didn’t see anything FRBRish. My French isn’t that good, though. Perhaps one of you who reads French can investigate? Maybe it’s just vendor hype.

Here’s VTLS’s product information for VITAL.

For fun, I checked to see what public coverage some makers of integrated library systems give FRBR on their web sites.

• Search at Endeavor: nothing
• Search at Innovative Interfaces: nothing
• Search at Koha: nothing
• Google search of Open-ILS: one blog comment pointing out OCLC’s FRBR work
• Google search of Sirsi: three mentions on Stephen Abram’s blog, but nothing official
• Search at Talis: twelve mentions on their Panlibus blog, but nothing on the main site
• VTLS: a special FRBR page with twelve PowerPoint presentations. The winner!

Another example of FRBR in use: RLG uses the model in RedLightGreen. Go there and search on a book title, for example “the hound of the baskervilles”. You’ll get back:

1. Hound Of The Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Sir Doyle
258 editions published between 1901 and 2003 in 31 languages.
Primary Subject: Holmes Sherlock Fictitious Character - Fiction

2. Sign Of Four, by Arthur Conan Sir Doyle
253 editions published between 0 and 2002 in 16 languages.
Primary Subject: Holmes Sherlock Fictitious Character - Fiction

3. Hound Of The Baskervilles Another Adventure Of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Sir Doyle
34 editions published between 1902 and 2001 in 2 languages.
Primary Subject: Holmes Sherlock Fictitious Character - Fiction

(Why so many non-Baskerville books show up, I don’t know.) Notice how in the first result, 258 editions published over 102 years, in 31 languages, are grouped together. In Under the Hood, they explain:

RLG needed a way to organize the vast number of records in the RLG Union Catalog without overwhelming users with a deluge of information about different editions. RLG turned to the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), an emerging model proposed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. FRBR distinguishes between a work, its expressions (e.g. translations), manifestations of those expressions (specific editions), and items (specific copies). The RedLightGreen database collapses FRBR’s four levels into just two, displaying a work and various manifestations of that work. This approach will reduce a potentially overwhelming number of editions into a smaller, more manageable set of works that match a user’s search terms.

VTLS, a vendor of of library software, has worked FRBR into their products. Here are some related links from their site:

• July 2002’s press release VTLS Inc. Announces FRBR Implementation
• Twelve PowerPoint presentations with lots of screenshots
• Table of contents of FRBR Cataloging User’s Guide