ALA 2008 conference notes: ALCTS FRBR Interest Group
Friday, June 27th, 2008 by Galen CharltonThis morning I went to the meeting of the FRBR Interest Group at the American Library Association (ALA) conference in Anaheim, California. For those who like lots of acronyms, the interest group is a part of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), a division of ALA.
There were two invited speakers. The first, John Espley from VTLS, discussed a couple projects that VTLS has started to promote FRBR and VTLS’s implementation of it in their Virtua ILS. The first, “Try FRBR, You’ll Like It!”, offers existing VTLS customers the chance to send a small sample of MARC bib records and see how they look after FRBRization.
The second project is of more interest to non-VTLS customers. VTLS has started an experiment to offer Virtua’s FRBRization tools in the form of software as a service (SaaS). A library would send VTLS an extract of all of their bib records. VTLS would then determine which subset of the records would most benefit from FRBRization, then create a Virtua database with the FRBRized set of bibs. The library could then set up their OPAC to link from bib records to the work-sets stored in the Virtua database. That would allow a patron to find a bib for a paperback edition of Tom Sawyer and click on a link to see a list of all editions of that work that the library has. From the work-set page, the patron could in turn travel to one of the individual bibs.
VTLS has a prototype of this service working for one of their Virtua customers, but they intend for the service to work with any ILS. The prototype seems to be quite new — Espley mentioned that it was set up in the past week or so — and during the question and answer session, Espley and the audience identified a number of issues for VTLS to work through. One issue is improving their automated FRBRization tools, as Espley said that some manual cleanup was needed to group together expressions in the prototype and create higher-level entities that VTLS calls “superworks” (under FRBR rules, the book and movie versions of Tom Sawyer are two separate works — a “superwork” puts the two works under a single Tom Sawyer concept). Another is keeping the FRBRized database up to date as the library adds and updates their bib records.
VTLS’s FRBRization service is an interesting idea, and it could complement services such as xISBN and ThingISBN by offering a FRBRization that is customized to a library’s specific collection. I applaud VTLS for undertaking the experiment. Of course, I have concerns about the openness of such a service, and encourage VTLS to think about keeping the service as open as their business model permits, including:
- Making sure that any web service APIs related to the FRBR service are fully documented so that their customers (and others!) can easily build mashups.
- Making sure that there are no restrictive licensing terms that would prevent a library from contributing changes they make to improve the FRBRization back to the library community.
- Publishing details of the VTLS FRBRization algorithm, in particular, to describe how and why it may differ from the OCLC FRBR work-set algorithm.
- Contributing any bib record enhancement that VTLS may do as part of the service (e.g., by adding uniform title headings) to the library community.
The second speaker was Jennifer Bowen from the eXtensible Catalog project (XC). The XC project aims to create open source tools and services to help libraries improve resource discovery and metadata management.
Part of the planned XC system is a “metadata hub” that would harvest records from a library’s ILS using OAI-PMH. Once in the hub, the MARC records would be mapped to a more flexible schema. Since RDA has not been finalized, XC is devising an interim schema that includes the Dublin Core elements (mapped to FRBR entities) and about 20 elements from RDA. As such, the XC schema will be a testbed for parts of RDA — as Bowen said, an “RDA sandbox”.
How does FRBR fit in? Besides the FRBR entities represented in the XC schema, incoming records will be split into their FRBR components. The proposed schema doesn’t seem to be available on the XC website; I’ll be very interested to see it when it’s published.
There was a brief general discussion after the two speakers finished. Of particular note: somebody asked how she, as a cataloger in a small public library that is not a member of OCLC, can prepare her catalog for FRBRization. This spawned an interesting discussion. One person made the point that catalogers should consider adopting a peer-to-peer model for distributing metadata instead of relying on central repositories to collect all improvements to metadata records. In the case of FRBR, this is important because one way to make a MARC21 bib record more useful for FRBRization is to add a uniform title heading. For such an improvement to be even more useful, it should be contributed the library community, but as someone said at the meeting, “While we are very good about sharing the first version of a bib record, we’re less good about sharing enhancements.”
To close with a bit of shameless self-promotion, I discuss using distributed version control systems as a model for sharing library metadata (and perhaps more importantly, changes to library metadata), in my article in the current issue of the Code4Lib Journal. While big central repositories of metadata such as OCLC and the Open Library are very important, I think a distributed record of record sharing is also needed.
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