FRAD draft 2 available for review
Functional Requirements for Authority Data: A Conceptual Model (second draft) (931 KB PDF) is available for download from IFLA‘s Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records. (That name is why you see FRANAR mentioned sometimes, but while the group kept the old name, their model is called FRAD).
1. Purpose
In libraries, in museums or in archives, a catalogue is a set of organized data that describes the information content managed by the institution. To group the various works by one person or one corporate body, or the various editions of a same work in that catalogue requires controlled access points for authors and titles. These controlled forms represent authorized forms and variant forms, in a given catalogue, for names and titles, which collect together all the forms of a given author’s name or of a given title. So the concept of “authority control”, which means both management of authorized forms and identification of the entities that are represented by those access points, is integral to the concept of “catalogue”. Authority control is beneficial to cataloguers who are able to see at a glance all the access points to an authorized form that exist in a catalogue and to identify quickly the entity. Even more importantly, it benefits end users who can use any form of the author’s name or of the title in their searches to retrieve the resources described in the catalogue.
The primary purpose of this conceptual model is to provide an analytical framework for the analysis of functional requirements for the kind of authority data that is required to support authority control and for the international sharing of authority data. The model focuses on data, regardless of how it may be packaged (e.g., in authority records).
More specifically, the conceptual model has been designed to:
- provide a clearly defined, structured frame of reference for relating the data that are recorded in authority records to the needs of the users of those records;
- assist in an assessment of the potential for international sharing and use of authority data both within the library sector and beyond.
FRAD gives us some new entities to consider: Name, Identifier, Controlled Access Point, Rules, and Agency. The draft explains them all and how they all relate. In the Relationships section (starting on page 35) they use little stick figures to show how people are connected. I like them.
After the first draft was out for review, “the Working Group met in The Hague in December 2005 to resolve some 145 pages of comments received from 12 individuals and 13 institutions (including 6 national libraries and 3 national-level cataloguing committees).” Comments on this draft will be taken until 15 July 2007.