The FRBR Blog

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.