The FRBR Blog

My net connection at home has been b0rked so my regular posting habits were interrupted. I’ve fallen behind but will catch up as I can.

The anonymous Scribe posted FRBR and FRAD and RDA, Oh My last Thursday, which was my introduction to some recent discussion I’d missed. Seems that FRBR and FRAD define the Person entity differently. Here’s what they say. First, from FRBR 4.6.1 Attributes of a Person :

“A person may be known by more than one name, or by more than one form of the same name. A bibliographic agency normally selects one of those names as the uniform heading for purposes of consistency in naming and referencing the person. The other names or forms of name may be treated as variant names for the person. In some cases (e.g., in the case of a person who writes under more than one pseudonym, or a person who writes both in an official capacity and as an individual) the bibliographic agency may establish more than one uniform heading for the person.”

And then from FRAD, 3.4 Entity Definitions:

An individual or a persona established or adopted by an individual or group. [FRBR, modified]

Includes real individuals.

Includes personas established or adopted by an individual through the use of more than one name (e.g., the individual’s real name and/or one or more pseudonyms).

Includes personas established or adopted jointly by two or more individuals (e.g., Ellery Queen — joint pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee).

Includes personas established or adopted by a group (e.g., Betty Crocker).

Quoth Scribe:

As smarter people than me said on the listserv, if you read these closely, with an eye towards personas (think Mark Twain for Samuel Clemens), you will quickly see that these two standards (which came out of the same institution!) are not similar, and deal with the idea of personas quite differently.

The issue, then, is…RDA is only taking its person definitions from FRAD. For me, this is just another signal that RDA, which is kind of supposed to be based on FRBR, is falling farther and farther away from FRBR, while all the regular librarians out there are still trying to wrap their heads around FRBR in a vain attempt to understanding how RDA will work when it comes out. How gratifying it will be when RDA comes out and all the people who thought they understood what was coming, don’t.

I’m not on that mailing list (though I will be) so I missed it. But I can catch up by browsing the archives of the DC-RDA mailing list. Diane Hillmann’s New RDA Vocabularies available (plus other info) is the first in the thread. Here’s a quote from one of Karen Coyle’s follow-ups:

In libraries we have the case where the *person* element in FRBR is not a real person (I had this as a long discussion on another list), it’s “the preferred name of some entity that uses a form of personal name in its authorship role.” If a dog ever writes a book and calls himself Dewey W. Dog, he will be a FRBR person. Already today, two people writing a book under one name are a FRBR person for the purposes of library metadata, and one person writing under a variety of different names is different persons. Which is why it will be hard to connect library data to, for example, other data using FOAF. Even where the names and email addresses are the same, they aren’t really describing the same thing. This is something I worry about as we contemplate setting library loose on the Web.