If you’re anything like me when you hear about FRBR, FRAD, and RDA you wonder who spilled their alphabet soup. But these are serious topics in the library world and we need to understand what each term means, how they relate to one another, and what we can expect to see in the future. Karen, our RDA librarian has kindly put together a basic primer for us to understand these issues.<\/p>\n
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FRBR, FRAD, and RDA are the newest additions to the Library world\u2019s collection of three- and four-letter acronyms.\u00a0 Many people are a little confused about what these are and how they fit together.\u00a0 This blog is an attempt at a simple explanation that will hopefully help someone better understand these hot topics.<\/p>\n
FRBR stands for F<\/strong>unctional R<\/strong>equirements for B<\/strong>ibliographic R<\/strong>ecords.\u00a0 The requirements were created as an entity-relationship model for way the bibliographic universe should operate.\u00a0 The FRBR model consists of entities, relationships, and attributes that are used to describe resources.\u00a0 There are three groups of entities.\u00a0 Group 1 consists of resources – Works, Expressions, Manifestations, and Items.\u00a0 Group 2 are those entities responsible for Group 1 \u2013 Persons, Corporations, and Families.\u00a0 Group 3 is subject oriented and consists of Concepts, Objects, Events, and Places.\u00a0 All these entities are described by attributes, and can be connected and linked by relationships.\u00a0 These elements are directly mapped to library user tasks and rationalize the way that data is organized and presented to the users.\u00a0 One of the factors behind the FRBR model was an attempt to allow library systems to create better relational databases from bibliographic records.<\/p>\n FRAD (F<\/strong>unctional R<\/strong>equirements for A<\/strong>uthority D<\/strong>ata) is the authority world\u2019s attempt to work with the new FRBR model.\u00a0 FRAD provides an entity-relationship model for authority control.\u00a0 FRAD defines entities such as Name, Identifier, Rules, Agency, Controlled Access Point, etc.\u00a0 FRAD entities also have attributes (descriptions) and relationships, such as earlier and later forms of names.<\/p>\n RDA (R<\/strong>esource D<\/strong>escription and A<\/strong>ccess) is a set of instructions or rules for the description of books and other materials or resources. RDA is intended to replace Anglo-American Cataloging Rules\u00a0Second Edition (AACR2), the current US standard for cataloging.\u00a0 RDA is built on foundations established in AACR2,\u00a0and the cataloging traditions on which they were based.\u00a0 A key difference in RDA\u2019s design is its use of the previously mentioned models as its framework.\u00a0 RDA uses the language and terminology of FRBR and FRAD.\u00a0 The FRBR entities, attributes, and relationships are used for bibliographic description.\u00a0 These are the elements used in RDA.<\/p>\n The RDA rules are organized to relate bibliographic description to the FRBR entities, attributes and relationships.\u00a0 The first four sections of RDA cover elements corresponding to the entity attributes defined in FRBR and FRAD.\u00a0 Since Manifestations are the most common entity, RDA starts with rules for those and then moves through the other entities, including Group 2.\u00a0 Except for Places, Group 3 entities have not been fully dealt with yet and have place holder chapters in section 4 until further work is done.\u00a0 Sections 5\u201310 cover elements corresponding to the relationships defined in FRBR and FRAD.\u00a0 There are several appendices and a glossary that helps with the terminology of FRBR that RDA uses.\u00a0 Records produced using the instructions of RDA are intended to be compatible with the large number of existing records created under the rules of AACR2.<\/p>\n In summary, FRBR and FRAD are data models that are an attempt to create a new way of looking at library information.\u00a0 They are the framework that the RDA rules are based on, and RDA rules are organized by the elements in the FRBR and FRAD models.\u00a0 RDA is a content standard, not a display, database, or coding standard.\u00a0 It is designed to be used with many different schemas such as ISBD, MARC, and Dublin Core.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you’re anything like me when you hear about FRBR, FRAD, and RDA you wonder who spilled their alphabet soup. But these are serious topics in the library world and we need to understand what each term means, how they relate to one another, and what we can expect to see in the future. Karen, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,48,9,19,25],"tags":[4,23,14,26,24,29,74],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ac.bslw.com\/community\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ac.bslw.com\/community\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ac.bslw.com\/community\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ac.bslw.com\/community\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ac.bslw.com\/community\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ac.bslw.com\/community\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264,"href":"https:\/\/ac.bslw.com\/community\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions\/264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ac.bslw.com\/community\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ac.bslw.com\/community\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ac.bslw.com\/community\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}