I’m making my way through the FRSAD draft (Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data), and now I’m starting to wonder about where and how genre terms will fit into the grand scheme of things. FRSAR only deals with ‘aboutness’, which excludes genre/form.  Maxwell has pointed out that genre is a mix of FRBR Group 3 entities, Concepts and Objects (the other two Group 3 entities being Place and Event.

RDA’s Section 7 on Subject Relationships, Section 10 on Recording Relationships between Concepts, Objects, Events and Places, and Appendix L (relationship designators for Group 3 entities)  have not yet made an appearance.

The term ‘genre’ doesn’t appear in the 144-page FRBR draft.  We need to look to 4.2.2 for Attributes of Works “Form of work”:

The form of work is the class to which the work belongs (e.g., novel, play, poem,
essay, biography, symphony, concerto, sonata, map, drawing, painting,
photograph, etc.).

In the section on Group 3 entities, in 3.2.7 Concept we find the following [emphasis mine]:

The entity defined as concept encompasses a comprehensive range of abstractions
that may be the subject of a work:  fields of knowledge, disciplines, schools of
thought (philosophies, religions, political ideologies, etc.), theories, processes,
techniques, practices, etc….

…For the purposes of this study concepts are treated as entities only to the extent
that they are the subject of a work (e.g., as the subject of a philosophical treatise,
of a critique of a school of thought, etc.).

But the genre or form is not the subject of a work; it is not what the work is about.  Of course, it is possible for a genre to be the subject of a work, and when it is, the term becomes a topical heading since it qualifies as ‘aboutness’.

Ok, I think I’m starting to get a sense of this.

Quite a few upgrade milestones this past month:

• SIS email project went pretty smoothly, and we are transitioned over. Now we get updates directly from the portal, on-demand, for just the records that are changing. Plus, the email address updating process will be way more transparent for users. A huge improvement!
• r2007 is proving to have quite a few immediate improvements that we’re enabling (Forgot your PIN being one of the earliest that we have in testing; better custom messages, etc.).

The system software upgrade to Rel. 2007 zipped along on Monday and was somewhat smoother than anticipated! By Wednesday, we were discovering new capabilities that could be quickly integrated into normal routines – so all told, pleasantly surprised at the relative ease, compared with the last upgrade.

By mid-week I was able to turn back to the Serials Solutions record reload. It was an opportunity to tweak the custom load specs and the results are looking pretty solid now. There is still an outstanding question about why the incoming marc data from SerSol has reorganized multiple occurrences of the same tag, but I anticipate that SerSol will be able to address that. I want to get the reload done early next week and be done with it. I want to move onto the coverage load, which could be tricky now that we’re on the new Release and things work a bit differently there.

As far as the SIS email patron load goes, those specs also need another check next week and more testing, but I think they’re in good shape. That switch is one that is sensitive in terms of the timing of the sequences, but we have flexibility there to do as many requests for updates as required.

This past week has been a total zoo, working on 3 major upgrade projects at the same time:

• Release 2007 (top most priority). We were poised one year ago last June to do this upgrade but missed our window of opportunity. It’s time now, since Release 2009 has just been announced.
• Patron database – mega change at the end of June — IITS is plugging the plug on one of the systems the library interfaces with, so this is going to change the way we fetch patron records. It was about time for a change there! So we’ve reconceptualized the whole operation and it’s going to be much better.
• Serials Solutions records upgrade is also going on simultaneously. This will give us briefs with stable identifiers and rolls them into the same update process. This meant going over all the specs once more (groan, a terrible exercise) but it’s also nearing completion.

Now I’m going to hit send and post this to libtools using the new wordpress ‘email to blog post’ thingee to check it out.

Hello world!