The FRBR Blog

• VTLS Announces FRBR Software as a Service, Available Now for All Libraries with any OPAC. “VTLS Inc, a leading global company providing Visionary Technology in Library Solutions, announces an industry first: FRBR Software as a Service. Now, all libraries can present FRBR-enhanced records to their end users without having to FRBRize their entire database, while keeping and using their current ILS. FRBR SaaS builds on a library’s own ILS database and web-based online public catalog by providing a hosted database of matching FRBR records, an online public interface designed to match the source database, and hyperlinks to provide seamless navigation between the two.”
• LibraryThing: New API: What Work? “I’ve added a small, but nifty new API that provides a sure-wife way of connecting any site’s book data to LibraryThing. The ‘What work?’ API takes an ISBN and/or the book title and author and returns the LibraryThing work number, with link URL in XML.” Example: http://www.librarything.com/api/whatwork.php?title=Harry+Potter+and+the+Goblet+of+Fire. “In sum, if you can’t connect your data to LibraryThing now, you aren’t trying!”
• Karen Coyle, Un-uniform Titles. “The Open Library will soon be revealing its first attempt to bring together all of the many published books that represent the same work. It’s been a fascinating exercise; sometimes very satisfying and other times terribly frustrating. If I hadn’t already been convinced that we will need to change our data practices if we want to implement FRBR, this experience would have convinced me.”
• Kelley McGrath, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Summary, and talks about Work records etc. “Do people really judge books by their covers? If not, then why is it that the Penguin version of Passage to India is rated 5 stars while the Penguin Classic version only gets 3?”
• Talet Chaudhri, Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles, Ariadne 58. “The most obvious area of concern is the complexity of the FRBR model. It needs to be made clear whether the model fits the needs of resource delivery on the Web and, if it does, which factors have prevented implementation and how they can be addressed.”
• Open Library bug #338474: Tom Sawyer Detective frbr-ization problem
• Mike Tribby: We will cheerfully implement RDA when LC and a majority of our customers
  adopt it. We will begin planning the changeover when one customer requests
  records done to RDA specifications. One word in my first sentence is a lie.

Tuesday morning last week I went by the VTLS booth in the exhibit hall at the IFLA 2008 conference. What a friendly bunch of people they are! They did a demonstration of their new FRBRization service, which I posted about a couple of weeks ago. It’s very interesting and I was impressed. I took a few pictures and I’ll go through what they showed and tell you what I remember of it.

You run a library. You have your catalogue on the web. (If you use VTLS’s catalogue front-end, Virtua, you can do all the following stuff yourself. If you run some other system, you’ll link out to VTLS’s web site to make things work.) Let’s say you search for adventures of tom sawyer. You get the usual list of results; in this case, three books were found.

Notice the “FRBR Display: See related information (FRBR)” link. Forget about the wording, the important thing is what you see when you follow the link

This shows a work-expression-manifestation display. The adventures of Tom Sawyer - Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 (highlighted) says what the work is. (There shouldn’t be a plus sign beside it, because there’s nothing to expand, and the things below it should be indented, but that’s a minor presentation thing so overlook that.)

There are two expressions: non-musical recording - English and Books - English. The first expression has one item each of two manifestations, one on CD and one on cassette. The second expression is the written text of the work, and there are five items of print manifestations. Books. The catalogue found three different copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, representing three manifestations, but this FRBRizing tool found two more that have different titles.

All of this was automatially done by VTLS’s FRBRizing algorithm, they said. They can take a set of MARC records and run through them looking at the 008 field, titles, uniform titles, main entry, author entries, everything, the more the better, and pull out the works, expressions, and manifestations. From what they said this Tom Sawyer example came from real data from real catalogues.

Clicking on one of the manifestation titles changes what’s displayed on the right-hand side of the screen, as I recall. The full MARC view is turned on above, but it could show the information in the usual online catalogue format, and link back to the original library’s catalogue to the user can place a hold etc.

You can see how it would be possible to put a “Get any copy” button at the expression level. If someone wants to read Tom Sawyer and they want to read it as soon as possible, then the system can find the first available item of that expression and give it to them. There’s no need why the user should have to check all five manifestations to see where an item is free.

VTLS makes MARC records for the work, expression, and manifesation. Here’s a view of the hierarchy breakdown for Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. You can see the name of the work at the top, and then lots of expressions, each identified by the orchestra and conductor. (Performance date could go hear too.) One of the expression views is expanded and you can see three manifestations are listed: the LP, the cassette, and the CD.

FRBR really does work well for music, as this shows. In the box in the bottom half of the screen is the MARC record for the work itself, Symphony No. 6. There’s a 240 Uniform Title field, but not the 245 Title Statement, because that belongs to the manifestation. They’ve put in a local field, a 990, saying “Work,” and the 999s are other local fields, I assume holding information about the FRBRized view.

This is a new service they’re offering. I asked if it would be possible to get them to FRBRize my catalogue and then have my system use web services on their servers to get the FRBR information when I need it, and they said sure, that’d be possible if people wanted it. With that a library wouldn’t have to send users from their own catalogue to VTLS’s web site, it could grab the information as it needed it (in XML, JSON, whatever) and display it locally to the user.

It occurs to me as I write that if libraries had this interface made and then opened up their data to everyone, so we could all see what manifestations went with what expressions and works, we’d all be better off. We’ll see. Until then, keep an eye out for people starting to use VTLS’s service. It looks like the best vendor implementation out there. I thank them for showing it to me, and congratulate them on their hard work.

In Galen Charlton’s ALA 2008 Conference Notes: ALCTS FRBR Interest Group from late June, he said John Espley of VTLS had talked about an online FRBRization tool, designed be software as a service.

I e-mailed Espley to ask more about this, and he explained, and I quote:

The FRBR SaaS (Software as a Service) is as you wrote “new and experimental.” In summary, the way it will work is:

1. Non VTLS library extracts their bib records and sends them to VTLS Inc.
2. VTLS Inc. will analyze the records for potentially FRBR records.
3. The identified potentially FRBR records will be placed in a Virtua database and FRBRized.
4. Using “web services” (similar to how book jackets and other media are displayed in an OPAC) there will be a link on the records in the non VTLS library’s OPAC that will redirect the user to the FRBRized records in the Virtua database.
5. There will also be a link from the FRBRized records in the Virtua database back to the non VTLS Library’s OPAC.

This is all new, but expect to hear more about it as things develop. If you happen to be at the IFLA conference in Quebec City next week, look for the VTLS booth, where people can give a demo. How this will compare to xISBN and thingISBN will be interesting to see.

I’ll be at IFLA too, and I’m going to sit in on everything FRBR-related that I can. I’ll write about it here. I’m always glad to meet people that read this, so say hello.

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.