Identity and attributes

I’ve been pondering what information is presented with a name and what information must be sought elsewhere since my announcement of this blog was signed with only my name and no other identifying information.  On AUTOCAT, where it is customary but not required to use a signature file, the announcement caused a flurry of posts about my identity and my credentials.  As far as I know, I am the only Lois Reibach in the world, but my niece is also lreibach and she has taken that identity in a number of online services.  What I have finally come to understand is that I did not include any Attributes of a Person as defined by FRAD section 4.1.  Probably the most important attributes in this case are:

• Affiliation
• Field of activity
• Profession/occupation

These attributes are all additions to those identified in FRBR.  So perhaps my marketing was lacking, but I have now been afforded the opportunity to look closer at the language of FRBR and FRAD, because at first I was looking at the task of identifying, which is where I learned that attributes were needed.

 

Australian workshop on RDA to include impact of FRAD

If your travel budget is better than mine, you might want to attend the Australian Committee on Cataloguing’s forthcoming ACOC seminar “RDA : next generation cataloguing standard”. 

This seminar aims to answer your questions about RDA and its implementation in Australia. The history and development of RDA will be discussed, especially the impact of the conceptual models FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data) on the new standard. It will also highlight the relationships to, and differences from, AACR.

Thanks to Library Intelligencer for pointing this out.

ALA: Getting Ready for RDA and FRBR: What You Need to Know

One of the meetings I would have liked to attend at ALA was Getting Ready for RDA and FRBR: What You Need to Know.  This was reported on in Metadata Blog.  There were three speakers, but the most relevant part is:

Glenn Patton, Director of WorldCat Quality Management, OCLC
Glenn Patton introduced Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD). Mainly, this is applying the underlying theories in FRBR to authority data. There are two objectives of this working group, namely, to gain a clear understanding of how authority data functions correctly, and to clarify the underlying concepts and improve the use of authority data in the future. Patton talked about the uses of the authority file by the catalogers and the users and brought up the model to show us what the group has come up with (see pages 4 and 7 of the report for the figures).

The report referred to is Functional Requirements for Authority Data: a Conceptual Model.  This is a topic that I expect to see a lot more of in the future.