Work, expression, manifestation, item … blog.
A weblog following developments around the world in FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.
Maintained by William Denton, Web Librarian at York University. Suggestions and comments welcome at wtd@pobox.com.
Confused? Try What Is FRBR? (2.8 MB PDF) by Barbara Tillett, or Jenn Riley's introduction. For more, see the basic reading list.
Books: FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert Maxwell (ISBN 9780838909508) and Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools edited by Arlene Taylor (ISBN 9781591585091) (read my chapter FRBR and the History of Cataloging).
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?)
On 25 June 2005 I announced this blog to the FRBR mailing list and elsewhere. Any suggestions for what to do here to celebrate? Aside from preparing for the One Big Library Unconference two days later, that is.
Hello,
I was able to go to the May FRBR workshop hosted by IFLA and OCLC, and it
was very interesting and thought-provoking. I'm really glad I was there.
One of the things that struck me was that many smart people are working on
FRBR but it's hard for the average person to follow it all. It's
especially hard for people out of the loop of academic journals and
association memberships. There's this mailing list, of course, but I got
to thinking that a FRBR weblog would be useful.
So I started one. I've set up
http://www.frbr.org/
and filled it with some things I'd had bookmarked. Please have a look
and tell me any suggestions or comments you have, especially including
good things to link to. If you have something FRBRish on the web, or a
paper in a journal somewhere, I'd love to hear about it.
I hope that over the next few months I'll have lots of interesting links
to post, and that the blog becomes a useful resource for people--not just
librarians, but anyone interested in FRBR--wanting to stay up to date.
RSS feeds are available, and comments are allowed on all the entries.
Pete Johnston posted FRBR & “Time-Based” Media, Part 1 and FRBR & “Time-Based” Media, Part 2: Clips/Segments and perhaps more will follow. Go give them a read.
Suppose I develop a machinima-based tutorial video introducing some of the features of Second Life for use by undergraduate students new to the application. I might make my tutorial available for streaming using my institution’s streaming server, both in Windows Media Video format and in QuickTime format. And I might make a QuickTime version available for download as an alternative to streaming. I might also make a second copy of that QuickTime file - exactly the same content, quality, size etc - available for download from my personal Web site.
From a FRBR viewpoint, I think this would be represented as a single FRBR Work (W01), realized in a single Expression (E01), embodied in three different Manifestations (streamed Windows Media Video (M01), streamed QuickTime (M02) and downloadable QuickTime (M03)), with the first two of these Manifestations each exemplified in a single Item, and the last exemplified in two Items.
And then it gets complicated!
Mick Eadie, Towards an Application Profile for Images, from Ariadne 55 (April 2008). A quote:
However, after much investigation and consultation, it was decided ultimately that FRBR did not address our requirements for the IAP [Images Application Profile]. In essence what is being done by FRBR is not the modelling of the simple image and its relationships, but rather an attempt to model the artistic / intellectual process and all resultant manifestations of it. We decided this was inappropriate for the IAP for number of reasons. While possible, an application profile of this complexity would require detailed explanation that could be a barrier to take-up. Moreover, it strays from the core remit of the IAP to facilitate a simple exchange of image data between repositories. While the FRBR approach attempts to build relationships between objects, e.g. slides, photographs, objects and digital surrogates, this facility already exists in, for example, the Visual Resources Association Core (VRA) schema. Our intention was not to reinvent or in any way replicate existing standards that are robust and heavyweight enough to deal with most image types. Rather our intention was to build a lightweight layer that could sit above these standards, and work with them, facilitating a simple image search across institutional repositories.
I just came across The Catalogue Display of the Future?, posted by Fiacre O’Duinn on his blog on 20 April. (He’s coming to the One Big Library Unconference in June.) It pulls together some interesting stuff about how FRBR could affect catalogue interfaces.
Karen Coyle sent Progress Report: RDA Vocabularies Project to the rda-l mailing list. “Note that the FRBR entities have been entered into the NSDL metadata registry sandbox [4] along with the FRBR relationships [5] and the FRBR user tasks [6].”
But then Diane Hillmann followed up to say, “The NSDL Registry now has the new version of its schema registration capability available, including the provisional registration of the RDA element vocabulary. Go to http://metadataregistry.org, and click on ’schemas’ in the right hand side browse list. Or go directly to: http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/1.html and click on the ‘Properties’ tab to see he currently registered properties.”
Ingbert R. Floyd and Allen H. Renear’s What Exactly Is an Item in the Digital World? is up in their university’s repository. (”Institutional repositories,” for those of you unfamiliar with the term, are web sites where people can put stuff. Which is no big deal, except that they’re official and run by an institution — probably a university or its library — and there are probably more good intentions about putting stuff into them then actual stuff getting uploaded.) It’s a five-page paper but it says it’s a poster from the 2007 ASIST conference, so I don’t know. Floyd’s new to the blog but Renear’s been mentioned before.
ABSTRACT: IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is a model of the bibliographic universe. Although initially its application to the digital world appears to be straightforward, upon closer examination puzzles arise. One is that within the digital world it is surprisingly difficult to say exactly what FRBR items really are. On the one hand, the ontological candidates for items (concrete physical states of the computing system) are rarely identified and treated as items in practice — even though they may indeed be affirmed as items in theoretical discussions. On the other hand, objects that manifestly fail to meet the basic ontological criteria for FRBR items are commonly treated as if they are items. We describe this situation and, based on a re-factoring of FRBR into a set of roles (relationships) rather than a set of entity types explore two possible resolutions. One, favored by the second author, is consistent with ontology implicit in the original FRBR vision, but allows assignment of item attributes and roles to things that are not items; the other, favored by the first author, is a radical departure from the underlying FRBR ontology, but preserves the original attribute assignments and roles.
Presentations by Peter Cliff of UKOLN, including one from a conference on 22 April 2008: FRBR and Metadata Application Profiles (4 MB Power Point).
Interesting: He tagged resources used in the presentation at http://del.icio.us/tag/vifws2008-frbr. Nice.
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.