FRBR explained pretty well

elliot — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:37:46 -0600

I've been struggling for a while to understand FRBR. It's basically (I quote) a conceptual model for the bibliographic universe. At its core are concepts describing bibliographic "things": books, works, scores, audio books, novels, all that litter. But there are two odd vague things sitting in between Items (physical things you can hold) and Works (the broad idea of "a work of art", separate from how it occurs in the world): Manifestations and Expressions. I kind of understood the difference, but they seem to have smudged boundaries.

This comment on the futurelib wiki by jrochkind cleared up some of the confusion for me:

An item, is an actual individual concrete book in your hand.
A manifestation is the set of all items that are identical (or close enough) in physical form as well as content.

An expression is the set of all manifestations that are identical in textual or information content. (or close enough for our purpopes; an archeologist would consider the coffee stain on the back to be distinguishing information content; we do not).
And a work is the set of all expressions that well, consist of the same intellectual work. This is definitely a cultural concept, but it's one we have and find useful. We consider the audio book version of a book to be the same book, just a different version. That's work.

Thanks Jonathan.

Also ran across Ian Davis' translation of FRBR concepts to RDF. He's my boss.

And the Resource Description and Access cataloguing standard, which I hadn't encountered before. And by coincidence, a recent UKOLN guest lecture on RDA just appeared in one of my RSS feeds.

Most of this was triggered by a colleague tipping me off to eXtensibleCatalog, a new open source discovery layer for bibliographic data, built on Drupal (amongst other things). It has its own metadata format, plus tools for translating out of common library metadata formats (like MARC) into their own format.

It's quite fascinating, this whole library metadata lark, once you get your teeth into it.

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FRBR explained pretty well