Back to Saturday again, then, and the morning's meeting of the Cataloging and Classification Discussion Group, organized by the ALA's Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), and devoted to topics relating to IFLA's conceptual models of the kinds of data that are recorded in library catalogs -- the most well-established of these models, of course, being the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). In her paper co-authored with colleague Nancy Chaffin on "Trying FRBR out: A pragmatic evaluation of how FRBR will change our catalog," Tami Morse McGill (Colorado State University Libraries) reported on an exploratory study of the extent to which catalog data at CSU is robust enough to support FRBRization with the minimum of manual intervention. Glenn Patton (OCLC) summarized the progress of the IFLA Working Group on the Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR), which is in the process of extending FRBRian concepts to authority data in the form of the FRAR (Functional Requirements for Authority Records) model. And Lois Mai Chan (University of Kentucky) and Ed O'Neill (OCLC) introduced the work that has begun under the auspices of a third IFLA Working Group, on the Functional Requirements of Subject Authority Records (FRSAR), that is chaired by Marcia Lei Zeng (Kent State University). Tom Delsey had published his paper on "Modeling subject access: Extending the FRBR and FRANAR conceptual models" in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 39, no. 3-4, 2004; the FRSAR WG had formed in April 2005; Marcia Lei Zeng and colleague Athena Salaba had presented their paper, "Toward an international sharing and use of subject authority data," at OCLC's invitational workshop of May, 2005, on "FRBR in 21st century catalogues"; and Tom Delsey had presented a version of his earlier paper at a satellite meeting of IFLA 2005 in Oslo in August. The focus of FRSAR is on what FRBR calls the "Group 3" entities (i.e., concepts, objects, events, and places) that relate to the aboutness of works. The emphasis of work already undertaken has been on verbal representations of those entities (e.g., subject headings), but classification data is also an integral part of any subject access model: FRCAR, anyone? Audience reaction to the suggestion that FRAR and FRSAR should more properly be named FRAD and FRSAD (given their focus on Data that need not be tied to Records) was mixed. Meanwhile, Paul Weiss (University of California, San Diego) reminded us that FRBR/FRAR/FRSAR are conceptual models and not system architectures or even sets of principles guiding display, and that the best way of implementing a conceptual model is: to think about it. So we're thinking.
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