[open-bibliography] FRBR examples

Thu May 27 14:55:06 UTC 2010

Karen Coyle wrote:
<snip>
So what you're saying is that what users want is the Expression, and I 
can agree with that. They don't know that's what they want, and in a 
public library in the US when you walk up to the desk (or go to the 
catalog) you probably don't need to specify the language in most cases 
because the libraries mainly carry English-language items. But rarely do 
users want a particular manifestation. (Maybe the ISTC -- the standard 
for text identifiers -- will be helpful here.)

I find the Work views in Open Library to be quite useful (although they 
need more facets on that page). [1]  We can link them up to discussions 
of the author and his/her works in Wikipedia, or to lit crit articles or 
reviews. If nothing else, the Work view means that users do not see the 
same thing over and over in the catalog display. If the Work view allows 
you to click on a language facet, then I think you've given the user the 
"least clicks" access to what they are looking for. And this is what I 
mean about turning this into useful functionality. Take the user to a 
page for Moby Dick (all versions, all languages). Have facets for 
language, format (audio book, large print book). Have links to the story 
as a movie, a comic book. But bring it all together in one page, don't 
make the user scroll through a long list. THAT is the value of isolating 
this thing that might be called a FRBR Work.
</snip>

I don't know if people want expressions or not. From my reference work with various types of people, I have discovered that it takes a long time to know what people want. All I know is that from my work with undergraduates (quite a bit now), they expect something very, very different from the library tools I have seen.

I am not finding fault with anyone. I am simply interested in creating a *practical" tool that will be of *real use* to our patrons and this means that everything we do must be questioned--nothing should be sacred. I love catalogs and have spent my career building them, but with the implementation of RDA plus the economic crisis, this has become a deeply serious topic.

The Open Library page is a better display than the very well-done, but bizarre Fiction Finder, which does a very good job of FRBR, but is horrifying to behold. http://fictionfinder.oclc.org I can't make any links directly into it, but just at random I am looking at Joyce's "A portrait of the artist as a young man" and I can't imagine that these displays would be of any real help to anyone. Certainly, they wouldn't help my students and I'm sure they would make a mental note never to return to the site again!

On the Open Library page for Moby Dick that you gave, do people really have such a need for this summary? And in fact, what is the purpose of the separate page? What if the "works" or "expressions" were only queries that bring the relevant records together for the user to manipulate further? For the headings there, Lucene and Zebra indexing can now extract the headings in a much more useful way, e.g. see the Koha catalog at Antioch http://tinyurl.com/2ukcwny and how Zebra indexing extracts the headings into the left-hand column.

I think Rob Stiles summed it up very well:
"FRBR has abstracted away all the detail that would allow this rich tapestry to be described in a useful way."

For example, if I were a student interested in Moby Dick, what would I want to know? I might want to know of videos that discuss Moby Dick and classes that discuss it:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/search-results.php?keywords=moby%20dick
and
http://tinyurl.com/34rlgsl

James Weinheimer  j.weinheimer at aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
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