The FRBR Blog

A special issue of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly will be devoted to The FRBR Family of Models. Since 1998 when Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records was first published by IFLA, the effort to develop and apply FRBR has been extended in many innovative and experimental directions. A special issue of CCQ in 2004 edited by Patrick LeBeouf was titled FRBR: Hype, or Cure-All? and included papers exploring the origins and extension of FRBR, as well as a survey of specific applications.

Submissions to the present volume should address an aspect related to the extended family of FRBR models, dialogues between the FRBR Family and other modeling technologies, and/or any specific applications of the FRBR family.

Ideas may include any of the following topics:

• Analysis of FRAD or FRSAD
• Interrelationships between FRAD, FRBR, FRSAD
• Modelling of aggregates.
• Applications of FRBR and family
• Analysis or comparisons of RDA, REICAT and other codes based on FRBR entities and relationships
• FRBRoo and its extensions, or applications
• The FRBR/CRM Dialogue
• Wider acceptance of FRBR in applications

Or any other topic that addresses the FRBR Family.

Proposals of no more than 300 words to be sent by May 31, 2011 to the guest editor, Richard Smiraglia (smiragli@uwm.edu). Decisions will be communicated to contributors no later than June 24, 2011. Delivery date of manuscripts for peer-review: [October 1, 2011]. Each article should be in the range of 5,000–8,000 words. Instructions for authors can be found at http://www.informaworld.com/0163-9374.

Acceptance of a proposal does not guarantee publication. All manuscript submissions will be subject to double-blind peer-review. Publication is scheduled for CCQ vol. 50 in 2012.

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly is dedicated to gathering and sharing information in the field of bibliographic organization. This highly respected journal considers the full spectrum of creation, content, management, use, and usability of bibliographic records and catalogs, including the principles, functions, and techniques of descriptive cataloging; the wide range of methods of subject analysis and classification; provision of access for all formats of materials; and policies, planning, and issues connected to the effective use of bibliographic data in catalogs and discovery tools. The journal welcomes papers of practical application as well as scholarly research. All manuscripts are peer reviewed. Once published, papers are widely available through Taylor & Francis’ Informaworld database and other outlets.

Richard P. Smiraglia
Editor-in-Chief, Knowledge Organization
Professor, Information Organization Research Group,
School of Information Studies
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
smiragli@uwm.edu

Seen on David Bigwood’s Catalogablog, quoting something else:

IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR)

Invitation to participate:

Review of “Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) — Draft Report” Available through: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/index.html or directly from: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/report090623.pdf (2,800 kb)

Comments deadline: July 31, 2009

FRSAD is the new name for FRSAR, just as FRAD started as FRANAR, Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records. Which you can now hold in your hands, because Functional Requirements for Authority Data is finished and now in book form.

This book represents one portion of the extension and expansion of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. FRBR has been published as Nr 19 in the present Series. It contains a further analysis of attributes of various entities that are the centre of focus for authority data (persons, families, corporate bodies, works, expressions, manifestations, items, concepts, objects, events, and places), the name by which these entities are known, and the controlled access points created by cataloguers for them. The conceptual model describes the attributes of these entities and the relationships between them.

It costs €69.95 or USD $84 for North Americans.

There are no links on IFLA’s site to a downloadable FRAD, and there’s no mention of the FRSAD draft. The FRSAD group is hosting the draft on their own web site. Neither group announced their news on the FRBR mailing list. I’m bewildered. I assume the final FRAD text will be available to download soon. Open access to FRBR was a major contributor to its success.

A FRBRy one-day preconference before the 2009 American Library Association conference is scheduled. Description taken from this PDF:

RDA, FRBR, and FRAD: Making the Connection

Friday, July 10, 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

This pre-conference concentrates on the role of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) in Resource Description and Access (RDA). The necessity of understanding these new conceptual foundations is key to the transition to the future cataloging environment. Participants will hear from a panel of experts on FRBR and FRAD attributes and relationships, new terminology and concepts, and participate in practical hands-on exercises.

Speakers: Barbara Tillett, Chief, Cataloging Policy and Support Office, Library of Congress; Robert Maxwell, Metadata & Special Collection Cataloging Dept Chair, Brigham Young University; Tom Delsey, RDA Editor, JSC; Glenn Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management, OCLC

Tickets: Advance: ALA Member, $249;

ALCTS Division/RT Member, $199; Non-Member, $289; Student, $99

Onsite: ALA Member, $299; ALCTS Division/RT Member, $249; Non-Member, $339; Student, $99

Event Code: AS4

Via e-mail John F. Myers sent to AUTOCAT. Sounds like there’ll be a lot of RDA on the agenda at the ALA.

Yesterday morning at 8:30 I went to a Web 2.0 discussion group meeting. I missed Karen Coyle (she spoke by webcast or recording, and wasn’t there), and then heard Karen Calhoun (OCLC) talk. Next she, Stephen Abram (SirsiDynix), and Patrick Peiffer (there to speak for Creative Commons) had a panel discussion and took questions from the audience. The panelists were all interesting but as usual some of the same old topics (are libraries still relevant? what is it with tags, anyway?) came up.

After that I went to the meeting of the Working Group on FRANAR, which (there were some name changes) is finishing up work on FRAD: Functional Requirements for Authority Data. They are very close to putting out the final version and wrapping up work.

There were thirteen people at the meeting. Glenn Patton (OCLC) is chair, and he and five others sat at one corner of a large square of tables in a large and otherwise empty room. Two people sat in another corner, I sat alone at the third, and four others clustered at the last. Patton started the meeting, summarized some past activity, and said the goal was for the group to wrap things up soon.

There were a few things to cover based on comments on the last draft:

• They’re going to add a relationship between Family and Corporate Body.
• There was a lengthy discussion about Person-to-Name (or Family- and Corporate Body-to-Name relations) and Name-to-Name relations. The way FRAD works, Person is an entity and Name is an entity. They are related. A Person can have a pseudonym. That is another kind of Name and the relation might be hasPseudonym/isPseudonymOf. But what if a Person has a Name in an early form and another Name in a later form? Are the Names directly related (they are both entities, so they can be) or are they only indirectly related, through the Person? They discussed this kind of thing for almost an hour and a half. Section 5.4 will be changed and some relations pulled out into a new Name-to-Name relationship section.
• Some stuff from the FRSAR meeting was gone over. RDF modelling and reversible relationship names are important. “isKnownBy” is hard to reverse but something like “isAppellationOf” and “hasAppellation” might work. There’s a difference between Major as a title and the role of being a major. And Major as a title is different from Jr. or Sr.

Patton wrapped things up, summarized what remained to be done, and said they’d have the final version ready to present to higher up in the fall. They want to get the final vote on approval done quickly, so FRAD should be all done in a few months, as I understood what was said and how IFLA works.

The sustained mental energy and focus of the people on the Working Group (and two of the observers, who were quite involved) was astounding. They worked for over three hours without stopping and always kept up good spirits. They spent some time on nitpicking details like any group editing a final draft has to, and other time on deep philosophical issues that will underpin cataloguing and authority rules for a long time to come. In my notes I wrote, “These people are incredibly focused. Their attention never flags. This must be what the negotiations about the Treaty of Ghent were like, but with fewer frock coats.”

Another interesting meeting. Keep your eye out for the final FRAD report.

At the big American Library Association conference in California a couple of weeks ago there was a well-attended session called Getting Ready for RDA and FRBR: What You Need to Know. The indefatigable Barbara Tillett (Library of Congress) and Glenn Patton (OCLC) were there, and Barbara Bushman (National Library of Medicine) filled in for Shawne Miksa who couldn’t make it. That blog post has some background information on all three and links to some useful things if you’re new to it all. There’s more on this page that has links to all slides and so on from conference presentations but you’ll have to scroll down a bit to the right section.

You Know FRBR, But Have You Ever Met FRAD was the next day, Sunday 29 June. Glenn Patton spoke again, as did Ed Jones (National University Library), and Athena Salaba (Kent State) and Lois Mai Chan (University of Kentucky) talked about FRSAR (Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records). Slides are also available but again you’ll have to scroll down a bit or just search the page for FRAD.

I wish there were audio recordings of these talks!

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.

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.

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.

Last month Glenn Patton said on the FRBR mailing list, in response to a query, that a second draft of Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) would be available “in the next month or so.” I’ll be keeping an eye peeled for it and will post a link. The first draft was published in 2005 and the IFLA Working Group chaired by Patton has been going over all the comments and feeback.

If the name FRAD seems unknown but strangely familiar, it’s because you’re used to hearing about FRANAR (Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records) and FRAR (Functional Requirements for Authority Records). FRAD is the new name.

I’ve renamed the FRAR category here to FRAD to match the revised nomenclature. Check out previous posts in this category to find links to the earlier draft.

There’s a lot of talk going around about Web 2.0 and Library 2.0, but this isn’t about that, so don’t worry. Here’s some mail I sent to the FRBR mailing list last week:

Are there any plans, or is it expected that, FRBR will be revised? Next fall it will be ten years (!) since the final report was made. Since 1997 there have been implementations that have turned up difficulties with the model and as it’s become better known it’s been exposed to some good critical thought and applied in many different areas.

There are working groups on aggregates (which are hard to handle) and expressions (which cause confusion) and harmonization with CIDOC’s Conceptual Reference Model (which I think will lead to an object-oriented FRBR). Functional Requirements for Authority Records was out for comment and that group is thinking about them now, and Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records is underway. AACR is being turned into the FRBRish Resource Description and Access.

That’s a lot of work going on. When these groups have finished their work, will everything be brought together, all the problems resolved or at least clarified with suggested solutions, and something like FRBR 2.0 issued? The minutes of the August Review Group’s meeting in Oslo say, “Given the importance of the topics to be addressed, the newly formed WG on Aggregates will presumably prove to be a major element in the RG’s policy for the two years to come.” What’ll happen after that? I’m curious.

No-one replied, but if I do hear an answer, I’ll let you know. If you know, leave a comment!