[open-bibliography] FRBR examples

Thu May 27 10:14:56 UTC 2010

For me the question is not whether FRBR should be exposed to those creating bibliographic data (it shouldn't - even within libraries while I'd expect professional cataloguers to be able to engage with this, these are few and far between, and many staff in libraries working with bib data on a day to day basis are not professionally qualified), but whether it is useful way to model the data in our systems.

I find it interesting that the original aim behind FRBR was to "The intent was to produce a conceptual model that would serve as the basis for relating specific attributes and relationships (reflected in the record as discrete data elements) to the various tasks that users perform when consulting bibliographic records." (http://archive.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr1.htm#1.2)

While this seems like a good idea - and I think has been extremely helpful in informing thoughts about resource discovery interfaces - I'm not sure it necessarily follows that this is the best data model for capture, storage or manipulation of bibliographic data outside discovery tasks. I'd argue that we need to find models that support a FRBR approach to resource discovery - so we need to think about how easy it is to present information back in a FRBRised display - which means looking at how we indicate equivalence and dealing with deduplication etc.

I'm feeling my way here, but the 'item' is the thing that most people relate to - so getting them to conceptualise anything other than this is not useful. However, when you capture the item related information you can look at how this groups with existing information. This would suggest (for example) that when you add an item title, your are prompted as to whether it matches an existing title - which may give us our manifestation 'title proper' etc.

We are already used to this I think as we might expect when adding an author to choose from a list of existing authors (if possible)

Enough - not sure if this is helpful or not!

Owen

Owen Stephens
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Library and Learning Resources Centre
The Open University
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E: o.stephens at open.ac.uk

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christopher Gutteridge [mailto:cjg at ecs.soton.ac.uk] 
> Sent: 27 May 2010 09:39
> To: List for Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data
> Subject: Re: [open-bibliography] FRBR examples
> 
> Thanks, Karen. This pretty much rubs in that there is no 
> "quick start" 
> for this model, and the person creating records is expected 
> to understand the details of the data model. This may work 
> well with fully trained library staff, but in the 
> author-deposits world I work in, that's impractical.
> 
> Part of the goal of open bibliographic data is that it should 
> be reasonably easy for people to create and consume (and 
> discover, but that's a separate discussion).
> 
> This model seems to describe the 'truth' better than some, 
> but does it facilitate or hinder creation and consumption?
> 
> Karen Coyle wrote:
> > There are some attempts at examples on the DC-RDA wiki:
> >
> > http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/Scenarios
> >
> > For each scenario, click on the link that looks like 
> "Scenarios/1" and 
> > you'll see turtle and RDF/XML representations of the data 
> using FRBR 
> > entities and RDA elements. These haven't gotten much discussion and 
> > I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but we can add more 
> examples and 
> > more interpretations of them on that site if that would help.
> >
> > kc
> >
> >
> > Quoting Christopher Gutteridge <cjg at ecs.soton.ac.uk>:
> >
> >> I think I would feel much more confident about FRBR's 
> >> Work/Expression/Manifestation/Item model if there was a 
> robust set of 
> >> examples of each level in the model.
> >>
> >> The best I could find is
> >>
> >>    * *the work*, a distinct intellectual or artistic creation
> >>    * *the expression*, the intellectual or artistic 
> realization of a 
> >> work
> >>    * *the manifestation*, the physical embodiment of an 
> expression of a
> >>      work
> >>    * *the item*, a single exemplar of a manifestation.
> >>
> >> Which is all very well, but it's still pretty 
> impenetrable. I'd like 
> >> to see (in the first 10 results for googling FRBR) some examples, 
> >> such as books, videos, music, a PDF of a confernce paper, 
> a recording 
> >> of a performance of a play, and so forth. I think it would cut 
> >> through much of the confusion.
> >>
> >> Given a set of examples for each level, it would be so much easier 
> >> for people to map things into the model. Without it 
> there's going to 
> >> be heaps of junk data where people just guess.
> >>
> >> Also, making some examples would expose any confusion and 
> assumptions.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248
> >>
> >> / Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/ / 
> Web Projects 
> >> Manager, ECS, University of Southampton, 
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ 
> >> / Webmaster, Web Science Trust, http://www.webscience.org/
> >
> >
> >
> 
> --
> Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248
> 
> / Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/ / Web 
> Projects Manager, ECS, University of Southampton, 
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ / Webmaster, Web Science Trust, 
> http://www.webscience.org/
> 
> 
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