Time and Location: Sunday, 1:30 pm – 5:30 pm, Anaheim Convention Center, 210 A-C
One would expect for something that old (in Google time) such as Ferber (FRBR), which has been around since 1998, to have spawned some kin. Meet Fred, er, FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data). And they didn’t tell you that in this program, you also will meet Farsar (FRSAR – Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records).
Actually, the first hour and a half of this program dealt with updates on activities at the Library of Congress (by Dave Reser) and at OCLC (by Robert Bremer). The next hour and a half was devoted to the main program topic and the last hour was for a meeting of the LITA/ALCTS Authority Control Interest Group. The cataloging and metadata crowd must have been conferenced out by this time because attendance was low compared to the sessions Getting Ready with RDA and FRBR: What You Need to Know and Creating the Future of Catalogs and Cataloging. Too bad since three rooms at the Convention Center were reserved (210 A-C) for this low-attendance event compared to the use of only 204B for the two overflowing sessions.
The main program consisted of the following:
- Getting to Know FRAD – Glenn Patton, OCLC, Inc., Chair, IFLA FRANAR Working Group
- Patton apologized to those who have attended the session of Getting Ready for RDA and FRBR: What You Need to Know where he gave the same presentation but noted that a second-go is not necessarily a bad thing. The moderator for the program said that slides from this session will be made available on the ALA Conference Materials Archive. In the meantime, you can access the same slides used in Patton’s presentation here and the diagrams he referred to to explain the FRAD conceptual model can be seen in the draft by the IFLA FRANAR Working Group. Note that FRANAR (Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records) is now FRAD.
- FRAD: A Personal View – Ed Jones, National University Library in San Diego, California
- Ed Jones’ personal interest in the FRAD model comes from his view that it would help him think about authority data in new ways just as FRBR helped him think of bibliographic data in new ways. He quoted Bernard Shaw to express this view better: “You see things and say ‘Why?’ but I dream things that never were and I say ‘Why not?†His explorations of what the DNB and Wikipedia.de are doing with authority data and control numbers (not to be confused with Identifiers) are especially very interesting.
- An Introduction to FRASAR – Athena Salaba, Kent State U assisted by Lois Mai Chan, University of Kentucky.
- I believe that the best way that FRAD and FRSAR have been introduced in the program can be seen in one slide (image shown below) from this presentation. [I found basically the same presentation here]. The slide below shows the commonalities and differences between the three models around user tasks. The user tasks in red font shows those that are particular for that conceptual model:
I would conclude, as Ed Jones did in his presentation, by noting that conceptual models are growing organisms. They model a certain way that we understand, at a certain point in time, a set of entities that we choose to include in an ontological reality that we agree to exist for certain uses and users. We need to connect our current practices and future goals to these functional requirements so that practice and theory can inform each other as we adapt to changes in how we describe and control bibliographic entities.