Last Week in FRBR #24
Free access to RDA from June to August: get it while you can
COMPLIMENTARY OPEN-ACCESS PERIOD shouts a page at the Resource Description and Access web site: “The contents of the RDA Toolkit will be open at no charge for everyone to try from the RDA launch date in mid-June 2010 through August 31, 2010. Sign up now and we’ll send you an email with your login information as soon as open access becomes available in mid-June.”
This really has nothing to do with open access. RDA costs money: $195 USD for one person for one year; $325 USD for one year for a site license with multiple users but only one accessing the system at a time. Open access means it’s free. This is a free trial period of a commercial product designed, I think, to entice customers and to help work out bugs.
I think RDA is a standard should be freely available to the entire world. That said, if you’re at all interested, especially if you don’t think you’ll have access to it when they charge a subscription fee, now is the time to try it out. RDA is built on FRBR (and it seems, from what little I know, that it will be a very interesting online system), so you’ll want to try it out.
Gemberling, Thema and FRBR’s Third Group
Thema and FRBR’s Third Group, by Ted Gemberling (DOI: 10.1080/01639371003745413) is in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 48:5.
For more on “thema” and “nomen,” read about FRSAD and last year’s Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD): A Conceptual Model, a companion to FRBR.
Abstract: The treatment of subjects by Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) has attracted less attention than some of its other aspects, but there seems to be a general consensus that it needs work. While some have proposed elaborating its subject categories—concepts, objects, events, and places—to increase their semantic complexity, a working group of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has recently made a promising proposal that essentially bypasses those categories in favor of one entity, thema. This article gives an overview of the proposal and discusses its relevance to another difficult problem, ambiguities in the establishment of headings for buildings.
RDA: 10-week Reading Program
RDA: 10-week reading program is just what it says it is. It’s week eight and I just found out about it! Sorry not to have posted about it before. Week 1 is the start. The only name on this is “Henry;” I have no clue beyond that who’s behind this.