"Loving and Leaving FRBR"

Editor's Notes

1. #2 – FRBR – FRBR is an information model that divides the bibliographical universe into entities that with attributes or characteristics, and that have relationships between them – the big 4 are the Group 1 – Work, expression, manifestation, item WEMI – but there are also Group 2 – responsible entities – persons, corporate bodies, families – and group 3 – subjects – concept, and groups 1 & 2 can also be subjects
2. This is the ideal that were promised way back in the /90s with FRBR – this is from FRBR Display ToolVersion 2.0Network Development and MARC Standards Office Library of Congress Based on Tom Delsey’s Research for LoCTom Delsey as part of the Functional Analysis of the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Holdings FormatsFRBR display tool uses - Test FRBR concepts through experimentation with collocating and sorting files by segmenting MARC 21 records into the FRBR "Works," "Expressions," and "Manifestations" entities.Hierarchical - The FRBR Display Tool sorts and arranges bibliographic record sets using the FRBR model. It then generates useful hierarchical displays of these record sets containing works that consist of multiple expressions and manifestations.
3. No surprise to you , but – Library cataloging has traditionally focused on describing the carrier of intellectual content – the package – is it the paperback that’s this tall, with this many pages, published by Macmillan, or is it the hardcover – with the exact same text, but a forward by someone famous, different pagination, different height, different publisher – that’s probably a subsidiary of Macmillan. Promise of FRBR is that it can kind of unlock the data in bibliographic records – and show the relationships between all these different packages of similar content – bringing out the differences when they’re important, when someone needs the large print, for example, but not when they’re not, when people just want stuff.What we’re looking at here is OCLC’s FRBRizedWorldCat - nicely brings together 858 editions & formats of the novel – 190 of the movie Question is – in FRBR terms, is the movie an expression or a related work? And – even bigger question – Does it matter? OCLC admits that they played a little fast & loose with pure FRBR – expression just didn’t work with the bibliographic data in WorldCat, they couldn’t reliably divide a work into expressions - so they left it out – that why we have this display with the novel & movie separate – close together because they have the same title
4. But before we start criticizing OCLC for sloppy research, we have to ask ourselves – does it matter, when you are creating a description of an information resource, to determine if that resource is a work, expression, manifestation, or item and at which of theses levels are the attributes, or characteristics, attached? Here’s an example form Karen Coyle – she says when you make a cake, you have your ingredients
5. When you mix them, you don’t end up with a hierarchical structure like this -
6. You get this – she says “My point here, in case it isn't clear, is that the purpose of creating a bibliographic description using a number of different entities is to... well, to create a bibliographic description; something that as a whole has meaning. You can create it from individual "ingredients," like information about a Work and an Expression, but those do not need to remain separate entities in your final product; instead, that information can become part of your whole.”
7. Now we are finally to BIBFRAME Work, instance, links to authority, annotation – links to locally relevant infor – No expressionhere either – hathis is from the BIBFRAME website; Eric Miller ALA MW presentation his annotation example is the copy of Great Gatsby, where they also have an F. Scott Fitzgerald archive with the original cover painting by Francis Cugat. Because http://blogs.princeton.edu/graphicarts/2010/05/celestial_eyes.html Chas. Scribner III is an alumSo instead of records in a database as the bibliographic descriptions, we have XML encoded bibliographic data that is on the web and can be linked to and fromBIBFRAME is like FRBR in that it is an information modelUnlike MARC in that it is not a record format