The FRBR Blog

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!

I added links to the FRANAR (Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records) and FRSAR (Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records) Working Groups to the Reference section on the left. They’re part of IFLA and very closely related to the FRBR Review Group (which used to be a Working Group, but after their report had been out for a while, they changed their nature). The FRANAR page will lead you to the draft of FRAR (Functional Requirements for Authority Records) that has been discussed here before. The FRSAR group was just formed in April 2005 and I’m not sure where they are in their work; all that’s on their web page right now is their terms of reference.

I’ll mention FRANAR/FRAR and FRSAR things here as they happen. By the way, if you haven’t read the FRAR draft, you should.

UPDATE: I added a link to the RDA home page, too.

A quick note: the National Library of Sweden, the Royal Library, sent a copy of their comments on FRAR to the FRBR mailing list.

[W]e are very impressed with your clarifying and interesting report which has been a pleasure to study.

Their comments, about the amount and purpose of information being stored about individuals, will soon make it into the mailing list archive, which is linked over on the left.

Catalogablog pointed out that the American Library Association’s Association for Library Collections and Technical Services’ Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access Task Force to Review the Draft Functional Requirements for Authority Records (FRAR), or the ALA ALCTS CC:DA TFRD FRAR as my friends and I call it, has released their Comments on FRAR (63 KB PDF).

We find the document to be generally acceptable although at times not intuitive or easily grasped.

As mentioned here in August, the FRAR draft is open for comment until tomorrow. Last call to send your comment to Glenn Patton.

The CC:DA also has a Task Force on FRBR Terminology that keeps on eye on that for the ALA.

The 71st IFLA General Conference and Council is wrapping up in Oslo today. I looked over the program of events, and saw only one mention of FRBR: FRAR: Extending FRBR Concepts to Authority Data (278 KB PDF), a talk given yesterday by Glenn Patton, who’s the chair of the working group that’s behind FRAR. (He announced a draft release of their work a couple of weeks ago.)

The PDF linked above has both the slides and text from his talk and explains everything about where FRAR comes from, where it’s at, and where it’s going. For example, and this follows up on the last post:

We have also defined a list of User Tasks. These are related to the FRBR user tasks but are specific to what catalogers do in working with authority data. The first three tasks relate to both groups of users [cataloguers and library users] while the fourth task relates solely to the first group of users [cataloguers].

Find: Find an entity or set of entities corresponding to stated criteria (i.e., to find either a single entity or a set of entities using an attribute or relationship of the entity as the search criteria).

Identify: Identify an entity (i.e., to confirm that the entity represented corresponds to the entity sought, to distinguish between two or more entities with similar

Contextualize: Place a person, corporate body, work, etc. in context; clarify the relationship between two or more persons, corporate bodies, works, etc.; or clarify the relationship between a person, corporate body, etc. and a name by which that person, corporate body, etc. is known.

Justify: Document the authority record creator’s reason for choosing the name or form of name on which an access point is based.

I’ll be tracking all of the FRAR developments here too, and if a group is formed to apply the same model to subject headings, I’ll follow that too.

Glenn Patton sent word to the FRBR mailing list that a draft of the Functional Requirements for Authority Records specification is available. That’s FRAR. FRANAR is Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records, and the IFLA group doing all this is the Working Group on FRANAR. It’s a bit confusing.

What’s an authority record? The document says at the start:

For the purposes of this study, an authority record is defined as the aggregate of information about an entity whose name is used as a controlled access point for bibliographic citations or records in a library catalogue or bibliographic file. The authority record normally contains the authorized or preferred form for the access point as established by the library, as well as variant forms and related access points used as references. In addition, the authority record may contain information pertaining to the entity associated with the access point (i.e., the person, corporate body, work, concept, etc. represented by the access point) as well as to relationships between that entity and other entities represented by related access points. The authority record will also normally include information identifying the rules under which the access point was established, the sources consulted, the cataloguing agency responsible for establishing the access point, etc.

It’s the thing that keeps Richard Burton the explorer separate from Richard Burton the actor in a library catalogue, and stops you from thinking one of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands made a secret visit to Mecca in 1853.

FRAR and FRBR are closely tied together and you’ll want to read this. Comments are open until late October.