Johnston, Names
In Names (such terseness is rare in blog post titles), Pete Johnston talks about The Names Project, which “is going to scope the requirements of UK institutional and subject repositories for a service that will reliably and uniquely identify names of individuals and institutions.”
Talking about names? Talk about, you guessed it, Functional Requirements for Authority Data!
As part of my pre-meeting truffling, I had a look at the (relatively) recent draft of the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) specification. FRAD is another product of IFLA, and it is a sibling document to, or extension of, the (probably better known) Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) specification. More specifically it’s the product of an IFLA group called the “Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR)”, with the rather confusing (to the outsider) consequence that the acronym FRANAR is sometimes used to refer to this area of work too, but I think the intent is that the model is referred to as FRAD.
Like FRBR, FRAD describes an entity-relational model, with the focus of FRAD on the entities related to "authority data" rather than to the “bibliographic record” itself. IIRC, I had looked at an earlier draft of FRAD quite some time ago, but the current version seems to have come on a long way from that version, and - from a fairly cursory reading on my part - it looks as if it may be a very useful document, both for those (like the Names project) seeking to develop applications in this area, but also for the non-librarians (like me) who want to have a better understanding of librarians’ conceptualisations of the world, e.g. the relationships between persons (or personas), names, and access points.