This document summarizes the background and work of the RDA Fictitious Entities Working Group. It discusses how the group was formed to address issues with representing fictitious corporations and characters in RDA. It describes how the group's work expanded to reconcile representing non-human persons in bibliographic descriptions with constraints in the Library Reference Model that require agents to be human. The group debated this requirement but ultimately had to conform to the decision that RDA would adhere to the LRM framework.

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NEW CONCEPTS: FICTITIOUS AND NON-HUMAN PERSONAGES
FEBRUARY 26, 2020
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>> Hi, everybody. This is Dan Freeman. We are going to get
started. Welcome to the second session of our RDA new concept series --
New Concepts: Fictitious and Non-human Personages. Amanda Sprochi. I
will keep this short. There is a lot of content to cover. We are live
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Remember to make sure your chat is set to all participants
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you to check out the ALA store for other resources. There is a lot
there that would be an interest to anyone in the library field. We are
thrilled to have Amanda back with us today. She is health sciences
cataloger at University of Missouri in Columbia. Served as Fictitious
Entities Working Group.
>> She will get us started.
>> Can you hear me?
>> We can.
>> Feel like I'm talking into the ether. Strange experience.
Hello to everybody. Bonjour to those who are here from French regions
of Canada and Brazil. Thank you for staying late or getting up so early
in the morning to come to this entirely thrilling presentation of
fictitious entities. My name is Amanda Sprochi. My job has expanded.
I'm no longer the health sciences cataloger at University of Missouri.
I'm cataloging for all formats and doing special cataloging and rare

3. books as well. My job is morphing as we lose people. My horizons have
expanded a little bit.
I should give you a little bit of background. How do I get to
my own slides? Sure.
>> Sorry. I left off on my slide. Your slide is next slide.
>> I found it. Okay.
>> We actually did practice but I forgot already.
[Laughter]
A little bit of background. I was a member of the catalog
description and axis which the technical service arm of ALA. That
division. In 2013, 2014 when RDA came out, we talk about problems with
the rules and navigating through filling in the gaps. This got started
by a paper from Adam Shift who talked about corporate bodies and what to
do about them. Get a task force together to deal with some of the
problems with RDA and working with fictitious corporations that come up.
This comes up not only in corporations and actual fiction novels like
the Goliath corporation and Jasper Ford's books that is a fictitious
corporation or the law firm by Dickens. Comes up because there are
corporations that will use pseudonyms when looking to make a move or buy
property. He they don't want anybody to know it's them. If we have
working papers and stuff that come out of these mergers or corporations,
it's Coca-Cola company, we are doing business as someone else, how do we
deal with this?
That's the nugget as this happens. As things do, they quickly
snowballed into something much bigger. We started to realize that there
were problems with what to do with pseudonyms and authors like Kermit
the frog and things like that.
We started this task force. I volunteered to be a member.
It's Peter's fault because he decided I would be the chair. I said yes
because I'm an idiot. We have been working on it problem for nine
months when British library published a paper dealing with issues we
were dealing with. They presented that -- at the time was joint
steering committee for RDA before the name changed. We were waiting to
see what the response to that was going to be. At which time the RSC
says there is problems we are needing to work on. We need to start our
working group. I got asked to move task force from ALA task force over
to RSC. That's how I got started dealing with RDA Steering Committee.
In the middle of the library reference model came out. Some
restrictions and reference model what could be an agent. Our work for
the next couple of years predicated on how to figure out how to marry
the needs to have these fictitious and personages. And to add here to
library reference model. Clearly some books are definitely presenting
non-human people has creators.
That was the beginning of how that happened. in the library
reference model. We have these three levels of hierarchy. So res is
literally anything. Anything you can think of or exist or doesn't
exist. Subjects, people, objects, theoretical constructs, whatever it

4. is, it's a thing. Res means thing. Most of you are familiar with this
by now. What library reference model does is define this in
subcategories or elements. Ones we are familiar with -- are sort of
bibliographic things used to dealing with. The task force and then the
working group I was dealing with came in. Stipulates that an agent has
to be a person or group of persons living or presumed to have lived.
Takes out any sort of non-human, so dogs, animals, fictitious
characters, gods, angels, devils, those cannot be agents. They are
subcategorized into persons and collective agent. Collective agents are
subcategorized into corporations and bodies. There is nomen that means
name. That's the name that we name things. They also added place and
time-span which thankfully I don't have to deal with.
In the Library Reference Model, what RDA did was take the
Library Reference Model and as an implementation of Library Reference
Model, allowed to expand and refine that model as sees fit for purposes
as long as stays within the rules. They sort of took the idea of res
which is anything and defined it to be an RDA entity. Anything had a
has reference to bibliographic description or anything like that.
RDA thing is res of RDA. Everything has to be any entity has
to be covered under that RDA thing is. So we have -- I know many of you
have seen this diagram before. You have a work and expression and
modification or item and created by an agent. Agent has to be a real
thing. Real person. And then there is an RDA entity which is something
that's related to the [Indiscernible] in some sort of way. RDA entity
is subclass of res.
It's those things that we deal bibliographically in the world.
The thing we seen, union verse of knowledge and bibliographic as subset
of that. Res is any possible thing in the whole world. We don't deal
with everybody possible thing in the whole world. We only deal with
things that are bibliographically. That's the RDA entity. A subclass
of res. That entity is related to any other entities that are used.
I'm an RDA entity, my nomen is the place that I born,
time-span that I lived. All those sorts of things. We are used to
seeing this. This has been around for a while. None of that is
surprising or new, probably.
Where my task force came in and the bump in the road
bibliographically was, when you look under description of agent is,
specifies that entity has to be capable of exercising responsibility,
relationships realities to works, expressions or manifestations or
items. Agent has to have something to do with work and expression or
manifestation or creation of that in some sort of way.
But in the scope, further goes on to specify that agent has to
have the potential of intentional relationships. Human beings are
directly or indirectly the mode of force beyond all actions taken by
such agents. They are specifying that has to be a human being.
Can't be anything other than a human being. Sort of the
philosophical background for that is that there has to be sort of

5. intention or has to be some sort of conscious deliberation in the
creation of some things. So in this manner, animals and elephants you
paint or make music or anything like that, are considered to just be
sort of instruments rather than beings who create things.
I'm going to take my former working group chair hat off and
say this was quite a contention among many of us who thought this was
not accurate. That was not a battle what we won. I happen to agree
with you if you think this is crazy. Decision is made that LRM came out
as it did. Decision made at basically highest levels of RDA Steering
Committee that RDA would add here to Library Reference Model. We tried
to get around it in all sorts of different ways. Sort of what we were
stuck with. All of you out there that are going to protest that
philosophically you don't agree with that, I privately agree with you.
We did not win that battle. Now I'm going to put my RSC hat back on
again.
This is restricted to persons who live or assumed to have
lived. This covers things like Moses, there is some discussion or --
Abraham in the Bible. Discussion whether these were figures existed or
literary tropes. There is a lot of argumentation over that.
For our purposes, we assume that they have lived. You can use
cataloger's judgment and make that assumption. Governance things like
Homer. There is contention whether the author Homer was one person or
sort of a name given to collection of oral histories that came down. In
this case, we take it at face value and assume that Homer is a person
that was responsible for creation of epics [Indiscernible]. If there is
generally acceptance of their probable historicity. If it's sort of
reasonable to assume they lived, you can go with that.
We will talk about cataloging cultures and different
communities may have differing ideas on that. And RDA, this is one of
reasons that RDA is sort of deliberately non- restrictive about this.
This is the crux. Fictional literary or purely legendary figures are
not persons. They cannot be responsible for creation of bibliographic
things.
Collective agents are basically people who work together that
are generally name. Generally agreed they have to have some sort of
name and work together as a unit to do something. We are familiar with
corporate bodies in the sense of Nike. This includes congresses,
expeditions, festivals. Ships are collective agents. Rules adapt to
what a collective agent said. Actions have to reflect agencies with
respect to agencies -- the collective agent or corporation has to have
some sort of responsibility for creation of bibliographic entity that we
are dealing with. Publishers, sponsors of conferences, all that stuff
we are used to seeing that fits into collective agent category.
Not a lot of controversy there.
Brings us back to problem what do we do about non-human who
are thwarted to be the creator of things. All of you that work with
libraries that have children's collection. Go back to Geronimo Stilton

6. problem. If you are veterans of the auto cat war. We thought we solved
that problem with RDA. We had. And then we plunged into what do we do
with things that are to be media by a cartoon mouse. That's something
we used as an example when trying to figure this all out. Not only
fictional characters like Geronimo Stilton but anything else that is
non-human. Animals, legendary figures, you can talk about gods. Sir
Lancelot, King Arthur. Anybody like that.
Spirits, we are familiar with example of spirit
communications. You know the spirit of Judy Garland or Mark Twain or
Winston Churchill cannot be a creator either. Fictional characters
can't. When we have this genre spin-off that is Indiana Jones die re.
I'm making that up. Kermit the frog is not a performer of rainbow
connection. Gods, angels cannot be responsible for creation of a
bibliographic entity. Our bibliographic problem, we are not allowed to
say that they are creators of bibliographic. They purport themselves to
be.
What would we do with this?
>> Bottom line why we care about this is use of the user. If
you have a 5-year-old coming in that wants the latest Geronimo Stilton,
for that 5-year-old, that creator is Geronimo Stilton. You can argue
over and over again the philosophy that Geronimo Stilton is not really
real and there is a person behind Geronimo Stilton. 5-year-old is going
to look and ask for Geronimo Stilton books.
We have a conundrum how we deal with these entities and get
them into bibliographic record. We are abjured by the rules of library
reference model from calling them creators of this bibliographic rules.
We are in a catch-22.
Library reference model because res can be anything can sort
of deal with this. Because the highest level relationship that you can
have -- remember, this is entity relationship model. In that model, you
have things and you have the relationships between them. That's how you
describe things. You can have in the Library Reference Model res has an
association with another thing. And that's actually -- that's the
actual relationship is just has association with. You are basically
saying, this thing is somehow associated with this other thing. That's
the absolute highest level that you can have. And then you can have
res -- in the theoretical World, we call it a thing.
>> Koko the gorilla has a thing has an association with the
film Koko the gorilla that talks. They are associated with each other.
Koko the gorilla, the entity has the appellation Koko the gorilla.
In the LRM that works. You couldn't say Koko the gorilla was
a creator. They participated in the film. That's the association with
Koko and that works.
The RDA approach is a little more complicated. Since RDA
didn't implement res as a thing, doesn't work for RDA. This is all the
other entities defined in RDA and nowhere in RDA is fictional entity to
find. We only have the place, time span and agent. That's it. They

7. cannot be agents, they are not human. They cannot be an RDA entity,
therefore. Nomen is designation that refers to RDA entity. We can't
even say that a non-human personages has a nomen. We cannot do that in
library reference model. We are really tuck. What do we do now? All
sorts of librarians that say we have to include these in the record.
You may want to have, for example, an axis point for Bennetts in Pride &
Prejudice dis-- deals with the family even not in Jane Austen's book.
How do we name these things and get them in the record that our users
will be able to explore and discover? What if you have someone that is
crazy about Pride & Prejudice and wants to read everything about the
Bennett family. Would be nice to have the Bennett family as a
fictitious family and have all those records be tied together.
>> This was our task.
[Laughter]
Yeah, we were like, okay. Great. We had working, ground
rules that we had to work with. Our charge and they take their marching
orders from ALA board. Way above my pay grade. My pay was zero. I
don't get paid for any of this. Our working assumptions or boundaries
were that we needed to have access points for non-human entities. Can
we just leave them out and all of the feedback that RSC got from
constituencies were not. We need to figure out how to do that. There
needs to be access points. We cannot just say, we are not going to put
them in.
Principles of collocation. They have to have same sort of
authority control that non-agents have. You want Geronimo Stilton the
same on every book so if someone looks up Geronimo Stilton they will get
everything that is related to that personages in the catalog. We have
to stick to the same rules for human personages than we do for non-human
personages.
One sort of helpful tip or helpful thing is that the library
reference model, stipulates that agents have to be human -- does not say
anything about what may or may not be included in an authority file.
What is included in an authority file is generally up to the community
that uses that authority file.
So in the United States. We use the national authority file
that is maintained by library of congress. LRM doesn't say anything or
tell ALA that you can or cannot put access points for non-human
personages in authority file. Rules that we use in the United States
using the library of Congress authority file is authority file has to be
named. Doesn't say have to be really names or fictitious names or
pseudonyms. Nothing. Has to be a name. They have names for corporate
bodies, families, people, places, titles. Title is a name of a book.
All of those are acceptable. Doesn't say, for example, if you have a
fictitious book that cannot have an authority record. It can. Doesn't
say that you can't the Library Reference Model. If it's okay for your
community and authority file that you use for your cataloging agency,
you can have whatever names you want in authority file. That is way to

8. figure out how deal with these entities.
>> We had some constraints, we had to accept the model. There
were parts of the model when came out in draft that we saw ahead of time
that most of us were not happy with. And we tried to go to white paper
and -- indeed library reference model to consider. They had other
communities besides librarians dealing with, absolutely not. The agent
has to be human. That's the bedrock rule we had to establish. We had
to accept that and a theory behind that model whether we necessarily
agreed with it or not.
We talked about if we could see if we could add another entity
to the RDA model. That wasn't allowable. And wasn't allowable because
for a couple of reasons. One, the -- felt they broke the spirit because
they didn't use res. Wasn't in keeping with the rules of the model.
Adding an entity that is hugely like by many, many times the amount of
money and time and effort that it takes to maintain all of this stuff.
If you've looked at beta of RDA and seen all the different attributes
that can be and relationships that can be attached to each entity, 2,000
attributes or relationships in the RDA data, every time you add a new
entity, that expands exponentially. Keeping it down to reasonable level
was important.
We talked about maybe taking the relationship decision nay
fors that we use like actor to modify them to fit -- we were sneaky in
trying to get around. What if we say it's not an actor, it's and animal
actor. You cannot do that. No.
[Laughter]
Solutions had to be compatible with link data requirement. We
had to stick to -- sort of went without saying, we had to stick with --
we had to stick with the system that was going to work with -- within
the entity relationship data model we were working with. The point of
doing this in the first place is to eventually try to get away from MARC
and get into web friendly way of representing data. That was sort of a
no-brainer. We had to stick with that.
Other thing we were told is not to think in MARC. That's
hard. We use MARC has a shorthand all the time and say things like
well, in the 245 field or whatever. RDA is standard neutral and
platform neutral. We had to get away from 245 field and had to start
thinking things like, you know, what is the preferred title. Because
preferred title is standard neutral. That was hard to get away from
that. So we would usually have discussions trying to keep MARC out and
usually I would say, that means in the MARC field that would be --
[Laughter]
We had to make sure that we were thinking in a way that was
outside of boundaries of what MARC can do.
As we started to delve into this, we had a few problems. One
problem is fictitious entities to name what we were dealing with as a
label was problematic. This has a specific technical meaning. Call
something a fictitious entity is sort of -- it's non-starter because we

9. can't have entity that is fictitious in RDA because entity means
specifically a subset of those RDA entities or things that we deal with
that have to be real. Other problem is that not all human persons, I'm
using persons to mean entity. I was trying to get away from using
entity. But all non-human things, beings, not all of them are
fictitious. Not all dogs are fictitious. My dog Willie would be upset
if I called her fictitious. This is dependent on culture and meaning.
If I am not a member of one particular religion, in that religion, they
may think of an entity as being real, I may think of it as a
mythological character. That's the realness or not realness boundaries
of things can get blurred. Depending.
We had to come up with something else. We started to talk
about them as non-human personages. RDA has come down on this sort of
the side of fictitious and non-human appellation. We decided to use
personages that something that is not necessarily human and not
necessarily fictitious either. When we are presented with bibliographic
item that such purports to -- purports to have an agent that is
non-human. What does it look like? There are two types that are
purported to be -- present themselves as being responsible for creation
of bibliographic resource. There is a clear use of a non-human
fictitious personages as a pseudonym for real person. Somebody is
behind the Geronimo Stilton books obviously. Small cartoon mouse did
not write the book. Somebody are behind that and Geronimo Stilton is
pseudonym for actual real human agent.
Same thing with Bush's dog Millie who wrote a book. Had a
ghost writer who is a human. Barbara Bush had help again from yet
another person. Those are pretty straightforward examples. We can
think of tons of examples of that.
Second example is when non-humans perform in agent-like
capacity. When we see animal actors, animals in stage shows and animal
communication. There is an ever growing body of scientific literature
about animal communications. So Koko the gorilla used American Sign
Language. Koko is a non-human personages. But actually creating
communications. There are blue and humpback a whale communications that
are out there. You cannot dismiss the fact that -- not only that whales
are not producing communications, there are specific whales performing
communication. Spirits and angels and gods who are acting as creators
of works.
So right now in RDA, if you look under guidance and you will
see the entry on fictitious and non-human appellations, says can appear
in manifestation title and responsibility statement. What bibliographic
do they belong in. Author of works. Expressions we leave out.
Expressions are difficult anyway. Frame is punted by not dealing with
them at all. There was some talk about that. RDA came down finally and
will made it -- whatever, came down on the idea that fictitious entities
and non-humans were sort of tied to the manifestation. I don't know
that I have any particular gripe with that. It's practical and works.

10. I'm happy about that.
The name or appellation can appear in a manifestation title
and responsibility statement, a statement of responsibility or an
element of subtype. Something that is one of the elements in RDA and
subtype of one offer these agents or -- of these agents or reference
sources.
I am sorry. I need a drink. I'm losing my voice.
Appellation of a fictitious entity included in a statement is assumed to
be pseudonym mouse personages. It's a pseudonym for real person.
Pseudonyms are all fictitious people. They are non-real people to give
a name to stand in for person who wrote the book. Stephen King wrote
books under a fictitious name. He's a pseudonym or stand-in for Stephen
King. Fictitious characters like Geronimo Stilton work in the way. No
fundamental difference between those two. Fact that one appears to seem
like they are human and other one is cartoon mouse, they are made-up
names to stand in for real people.
That's within the boundaries of RDA. Fits in with RDA. Not a
lot of problems with that. These are considered to be other types of
pseudonyms. Where the rub comes in is non-human entity associated with
statement of responsibility that is just considered to be external to
RDA.
Fictional things are pseudonyms and non-humans like angels and
devils, these are things that are not human. RDA punts on this and says
that is not really within the scope of RDA. Which is good and bad.
It's bad in that would have been nice to have these things recognized
and incorporated in the model that we are using to catalog from.
Good though in that by sort of saying this is outside our
scope and we are not going to deal with it, means that we can figure out
ways around it and ways to get newer records without breaking the model.
We are saying, it's external to RDA. It's a bit of a punt. It works on
a practical level. I'm much more of an engineer than a theorist. I can
work with that. We can figure that out.
If we think about user tasks and expectations, we have to
remember that -- a lot of us catalog in academic environments. I'm not
discounting all of you wonderful public librarian folks -- I come from
an academic side. It's difficult for the people who are putting these
rules together who are -- many of them if not all exclusively from
academic institutions to remember that our users are all educational
levels and all ages. The assumptions that we make about what you are
users are able to do or how our users find or search for things has to
be broader than the narrow sort of highly educated collegiate academic
very highly educated general person that might be out there. Our
audience is everyone from toddlers and Pre-K children who do not read
and write to people with doctorates and everyone in between. People who
don't read words. Who use Braille or other form of tactile text.
People who know multiple languages. People who are second language
learners. We can think of varied users that we have out there and

11. different set of skill levels.
We have to consider that we can't sort of have a model user in
our mind. We have to think of how this system is going to work for
everyone from toddler who wants their Geronimo Stilton book to up to two
people who will doing serious in-depth research on characters in Jane
Austen model that is use Bennett family as assist point.
Every reader their book. And every book reader and save the
time of the reader. We want people to type in Geronimo Stilton and find
every book in our library that has Geronimo Stilton in it. I don't
think that's unreasonable. That's what our users are going to expect
when they come to the library and look in our catalog. So, yeah,
preschool kid wants to find the latest Geronimo Stilton book or goose
bumps build or sweet valley high. Do they have those? I don't know.
Maybe you are looking -- maybe he's doing a dissertation on
spin-off or whatever starting with original stories and other authors
that used Dr. John Watson. Film buff may want to watch the shows with
Asta the dog. These are examples of people looking for fictitious or
non-human in the library.
How do we deal with? As practical catalogers sitting with
resource in our hands. What do I need to do to get the information we
need into my record. It's non-human personages, fictional or not that
suspect acting like a pseudonym, you treat it as a pseudonym. Strong
arguments that we made in that and everyone agreed with, you certainly
as cataloger don't want to sit around parsing out whether it's like,
Richard Bachman is okay. Geronimo Stilton is not okay. Because it's a
mouse. There is no fundamental difference. Part of reason to have
rules and cataloger's judgment, you don't have to agonize over, how
human is the pseudonym who is not a human anyway. It's basically
pseudonyms whether they seem to be real or seem to be fictional cartoon
characters are all pseudonyms. You treat them all the same. You don't
have to make a judgment decision or how human-like is the pseudonym.
Geronimo Stilton is probably a pseudonym for Elisabetta Dami.
They maintain that -- I don't want to say fiction. They maintain the
fiction that the mouse writes the books. Like Santa Claus for their
Pre-K audience. To keep the mystery going. We respect that. Geronimo
Stilton is going to be listed as the agent that creator of that book.
Same way that Richard Bachman is going to be listed as creator of
Stephen King.
And John Watson is the author of that book. John Watson is
pseudonym for Nicholas Meyer.
So RDA, it's clear about the treatment of pseudonyms. They
are sort of the condition that there is a fictitious personages appears
in statement of responsibility and agent is known. So you can recorded
name as a pseudonym of an agent. And then you can relate that pseudonym
to the actual agent using a relationship element. That, of course, is
going to take place in the authority file. So in this case, you are
going to have cross references on the records that lead back and forth

12. to each other.
So in RDA, you have a choice when presented with John Watson
as author as pseudonym for Nicholas Meyer. You can recorded author as
Nicholas Meyer and relate John Watson to Meyey as an authority. Record
John Watson as author. And have authority record. And relate them
together using appropriate relationships. So in shorthand using MARC
speak, you can make John Watson his own authority record and cross 500
references and authority record for each of them. That sort of is up to
the authority file folks and how they want to handle those and
individual catalogers who are making the authority record. Either one
of those ways are fine, you have to pick one and go with it.
Geronimo Stilton is a pseudonym of Elisabetta Dami. We know
that they wrote the first few books. Assumption she is still writing
them, we are not sure. You can do the same thing. If you are pretty
sure that Elisabetta Dami has written all of the Geronimo Stilton books,
you can make Geronimo Stilton a cross reference in her authority record
or you can record Geronimo Stilton as author with own authority record
and relate to each other. I tend to like the second option better.
There are many people that used that pseudonym, you can relate all of
them together. Gives a richer picture of what's going on
bibliographically.
In this case, you put Geronimo Stilton as the author as a
pseudonym. And then he would have own authority record. And there
would be a cross reference to the person and real identity of the -- of
this person is Elisabetta Dami. Pretty straight forward. In her
record, you are going to have a cross reference back to real identity of
person of RDA sort of speak and hard to parse out. That's the cross
reference to Geronimo Stilton. Just the way we relate people now,
nothing new. If you don't know who the person is, real person is behind
the fictitious person, you can either use a structured or unstructured
description. There is four different ways that you can describe things
in RDA and use the right relationship elements. Sort of -- bring that
back. Kermit the frog is supposedly the author of this book before you
leap. We don't know who created it. You can recorded fictitious entity
using unstructured. Not have any authorized access point or use a
structured access point and relate that to do resource using an
appropriate relationship. So you have Kermit the frog. It's a
pseudonym. We treat it like a pseudonym. Would be listed there as
author and you don't know just like with any other pseudonym author of
sense and sensibility before we knew it was Jane Austen or the doctor's
companion or any phrase or anything people use, use that as the 100
field.
In linked data, this works. You have a curse of the cheese
pyramid. Author of Geronimo Stilton who is author of curse of the
cheese pyramid. And Geronimo Stilton identity is Elisabetta Dami and
the alternate is Geronimo Stilton. This links to the author and the
others.

13. When we start getting to real non-humans, existing
non-fictitious non-humans like dogs, we have another use case and
another different side of issues. This doesn't work on WebEx. This is
a clip from Bringing up baby. This is Skippy I believe. He appeared in
many films in the 20 and 30s -- this is Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.
What do you do with that. They do research on animal actors and want to
find all the dogs that performed in the films in the 30s. According to
library reference model, they cannot be agents. They are not people.
They are clearly not pseudonyms. Skippy the dog is Skippy the dog. Not
a pseudonym for real person. He's a dog. They perform tasks and roles
that we attribute to an agent. Skippy is a performer who performs.
Humans are agents. Skippy is not. What do we do?
>> RDA tells us that an appellation appears in statement of
responsibility. Only thing we can do is relate them to statement of
responsibility. This is working in the same way of highest level in
library reference model is res is related in some sort of way or
connected to another res. This is basically that high level -- this is
a way to say that, you know, this non-human thing -- I don't want to use
the term entity -- this non-human is related in some sort of way to one
of bibliographic entities in RDA. That's all you can say about it. We
are punting on this and we are not -- it's not -- can't be included in
our model. Skippy the dog, like we said, according to library reference
model, cannot be an actor or performer the way we do a human, that's an
agent relater. He acts in films and not a pseudonym for a person. He's
real and exists. RDA treats this as non-RDA entities. Subjects are not
covered by RDA. RDA gives them guidance on how to relate subjects to
RDA entities. RDA doesn't cover subject analysis and -- so doesn't
cover things like objects like cars and that sort of thing when they are
the subject of a resource. Best we can do is use the entity
relationship to say that non-human personages is some way related to
this in the same way they are a subject. Subject is a subject of kind
of a subcategory of this related entity.
We have Koko the gorilla. And this is other authority record.
And so she has all of her different pseudonyms that are used in
different languages. I particularly like this because fine animal
gorilla what Koko signs. Those are signs she uses for herself which I
find is charming. This is her authority record. She is a being that
exists in the universe. We have authority record for her. The
authority record that -- she performs in this, someone brilliant and
used on-screen participant, that doesn't use any of agent relationships
and got around it kind of. Under the new RDA rules, what you do if you
have her 700, authorized access point and have relationship entity of
work, Koko is related to this in some sort of way.
We can get her in there. She does have an access point. She
is searchable. She does -- she is able to be found in catalogs by users
and sort of checks all of those requirements.
Animals are straightforward.

14. We get to gods, angels and spirits and legendary characters
that do not fall in these categories. They are not animals or people.
We will assume that they are -- never lived and have not -- have not
ever lived. Whether you decide Superman is legendary character or
fictitious character, you could quibble over that.
Whether these are pseudonyms for real people are going to have
to be determined by cataloging agency. If someone writes a book
purporting to be the spirit medium of somebody, cataloging agency and
the authority -- people are maintaining the authority files. Going to
have to make calls on whether something is fictitious or is
non-fictitious -- not fictitious but also non-human. RDA has not given
any rules about this in order to accommodate different views and
different communities. Non-human personages is considered to be a God
maybe very real and living or may have lived. Whereas another community
looking at that entity saying, they never existed and they are
fictitious. RDA is trying to be useful for all cultures. Deliberately
not made a ruling on this so can accommodate different views.
>> Here is wander in spirit land. Franchezzo. Who supposedly
dictated this become through medium. And so now they would probably
get, probably put them in the 100 field. And give them sort of credit
for being the author of this book which we can't do under RDA. Instead,
we're going to give them a related entity of work and simply saying that
Franchezzo is related to this book -- a wanderer in the spirit lands.
We are not going to assume that A. Fairneze [phonetic] is the
author. We cannot say that Franchezzo is the author. We are not going
to assume that it's all Fairneze and Franchezzo doesn't exist. One of
the rules of cataloging is take things at face value. If someone says
Kermit wrote that book, Kermit wrote that book and we have to present
that information.
Here is a case where the angel Gabriel sent messages down.
This is he is credited as being the author. We would move this down and
be related entity of work and down in non-human world. We would have
the preferred entry be the title.
>> What are implications for national authority files.
Authority records cannot be RDA. Cannot have agent relationships to
works and expressions. And the instructions for identifying these or
how to deal with them can't come from RDA or, therefore, from the policy
agents. They are not going to have policies on how to deal with these.
Back to cataloging community who are creating authority files basically
to say, here is our guidance and then you figure out how to deal with
them in your authority file.
Next few slides are LC ideas how to deal with this. This is
danger warning. I don't think they made any decisions about this that I
could find. If they did, I missed it. This is sort of in limbo. Do
not take this as gospel or what's going to happen. This is sort of
where the thinking is going.
So to make it work they are going to keep the national

15. authority records and allow authority records for non-human personages
as needed if you need to make an entry for dog as an actor that your
categorizing, you can do that. Fictitious groups are in the subject
file and not the name authority file. New instructions for constructing
headings for non-human personages and description conventions that we
will be able to label these so you know what they are. This was in
June. Nothing has been decided or written out yet. If I'm wrong about
that, anyone knows anything different, let me know. I've been told
there has not been any movement on this.
New authority for like Uggie who was a Frasier terrier, it
would be in the 075, these are non-human personages. You would label
that. You would be able to tell. Uggie still be able to have an access
point and under authority control.
In the bib example. This is written by Uggie and Wendy
Holden. They are authors. They will get the 100. Uggie will be down
here. You will use the RDA relationship.
What's next? RDA is developing. Beta is still being worked
on. Hopefully more guidance and examples how to deal with this right
now. Right now it's bare bones. There is a little bit of guidance in
there now. My caveat always, this presentation is what I know to the
best of my understanding.
[Laughter]
And I was the chair of the committee and I did this for three
years and I'm fuzzy with details as they are coming out. Mostly because
I don't have control over where we did our thing. Our task force,
working group is done, we disbanded and sent our working group to the
RDA. What they decide is up to them. This is close to what is going to
be the final decision on this stuff. Stay tuned and there may be an
update at some point.
Words of advice. Don't panic. They were running around.
Doesn't work in WebEx. What else is new? We seem to be going through a
time of change. Will sort itself. My caveat is, what you do on OCLC
and what you do in your local catalog is totally up to you. What is the
local catalog stays in the local catalog. If you decide you want to do
something different, cataloging police are not going to come to get you.
Things will sort themselves. I think they are sorting themselves. We
managed to -- my committee worked to make this more understandable. If
you have any questions about any of it, here is further reading and
things that have come out. You will have the slides available. And you
can always ask me questions, send me questions. I will be happy to
answer them. Many, many thanks to Kay James who worked on this a lot.
She is former example editor and Doug who helped with critique and
slides. Thanks so much. Any questions? I will be glad to take them.
>> First questions. I just called you Kate. You were talking
about Kate James. What is current thinking about subject headings like
Holmes, subject Sherlock?
>> I think what's going to happen, subject headings like

16. Sherlock Holmes are going to use the name authority file version, yeah,
exactly. Thank you, Adam. Adam is the guru. He would know. Thank you
for making me think I have not completely lost my -- mind on that.
Anything that's name is generally going to be in name authority file.
You would use the authority file for that. Library of Congress
started -- this was the issue. In sort of anticipation of RDA on the
library of Congress several years ago, started to move names sort of
fictitious characters out of subject headings and into the name
authority file and this wrinkle of fictitious entities came up and huge
stop. And that was when -- that was part of the thinking and RDA came
out and basically said, we are going to punt on these. If you want
these in the authority file, that works. We are not saying anything
about authority files. LCA has made decisions to keep in authority
file. Exactly. It will be a 600 rather than a 650. Yeah, for
subjects, there is really no issue. Library Reference Model and RDA are
about description access. They do not say anything about subjects.
It's outside their scope. It's a lot more -- it's a lot more simple.
You can use name to access name for someone as a subject.
>> Hopefully this question will make sense. MARC 21 tag?
150, not 100?
>> I think if you are talking about the authority file or
using it in bib records either way it's still a name. They are not
subjects in this case. The way that work for [Indiscernible] he's going
to get a 100. Going to get a 600, going to be the same ways for these.
If that's what you are asking.
>> Can you clarify the relationship decision nay fors. Would
you use author for 700 non-human?
>> No, you can't. You cannot use any of those agent
relationship designators for anything that is not an agent. You can use
a -- Geronimo, that's a simple pseudonym. Pseudonyms are
straightforward. For Koko, you can only use that related entity of --
or whatever that phrase that they use. That's pretty much all you can
say.
>> We're at the end of list of questions. Maybe we should do
a brief pause. We still have some time left. If you have questions,
now is the time to ask them.
>> And Adam is here. His paper started this whole thing. You
can blame him. Just kidding. Love you, Adam.
[Laughter]
>> We did have a question come in from Danielle. Can you
clarify treatment versus -- [Indiscernible].
>> Fictitious company is one of those -- I think -- this is
one of those areas that still is not very clear to me. But it's going
to be basically -- if fictitious company is standing in for real
company. For example, if it's a pseudonym because it's one of those
cases where it's Coca-Cola doing business as something else. One of the
reasons this came up in films frequently, film production when Star Wars

17. movies is being filmed, they use a pseudonym for their company.
Everybody will know it's Star Wars movie. In that case, I would assume
be treated like a pseudonym. If it's an actual fictitious company like
Goliath corporation from Jasper Ford books who has purported to put out
something, I think you have to do it the same way that you have to do --
well, no, I guess it would just be -- be considered a pseudonym too.
There has not been that much information about it.
So I -- probably am going to punt that. I think in most
cases, you can treat it as a pseudonym. In other cases like if were the
Goliath corporation from -- yeah, that could be a pseudonym for Jasper
Ford. Probably going to be a pseudonym. Might be in some cases where
it may not be. I can't think of any. Sorry.
>> Whoops. Another question. Can you explain the difference
between a legendary and mythological character?
>> Yeah, that's I don't think so either, Adam. A lot of that
is going to be community specific. So I don't know that there is
anybody defined that in sort of an RDA connection -- context because
doesn't matter really. I tend to think of legendary characters as
Lancelot perform or being that have connection to being myth. That's my
understanding. I don't know that there is necessarily an official
difference between those. They are treated the same way. I don't know
that anybody has gone to the trouble to define one versus the other.
Paul bunion versus zoos. I tend to think of -- as a legendary
character. For some Christians, Moses is a real person.
>> LCs decision to change fictional characters from 650 to 600
has nothing to do with RDA, correct?
>> Give me a minute to think about the progression of how this
all happened? Before the LRM. They moved things to RDA. Why did they
make that decision? Fictitious persons are characters in the non-LRM.
That was what happened. Thanks, Adam. When RDA came out, treated
all -- didn't make the distinction between a real author and a
fictitious author. Sorry. This is way back machine for me at this
point. You take what you see -- you take what you see. If author is
supposed to be Kermit the frog, it's Kermit the frog. And in part was
to do away with endless arguments over whether Geronimo Stilton was --
could be the author because he's a pseudonym or fictitious character.
RDA, first RDA came out and said we are not going -- we are going to say
if purported to be the author, we are not going to split hairs over
that. LRM came out, no, in order to be an author and author
relationship with a work, has to be an agent with has to be a legal
person. LC in the middle of making those conversions from fictitious
characters being in the subject to fictitious character in the authority
file now in the first RDA they could be authors. That grounded to halt.
What do we do. We are going to keep putting them in named authority
file. LRM says we don't care where you put them. Keep going.
[Indiscernible] persons in LC authority file. I don't know that LC
authority file makes any judgment over -- yeah, nobody is going to put

18. fictitious characters back in authority file. Name authority file is
filled with sorts of things that are filled with real people and not
real people, doesn't make a distinction between any of that. I think
the important thing, they are not going back into the subject authority
file. That is one of the things when there was a change in the LRM, I
know people of library of Congress were like, crap, we don't want to
move all that stuff back. Turns out that not required that they could
move it back. The name of authority file is collection of names.
That's just -- that was -- so -- if it's a name, in the name
authority file. It's not really anymore specific than that. Has to be
a name. Whether you are real or not real, mythological, legendary, a
ghost, they are all in there with their names. I'm reading Kate's
thing.
Yeah, if I said different. Just to clarify, [Indiscernible]
cannot be an author. (Uggie).
>> I think that was old way and new way is 700. Uggie is dog
under RDA. Cannot be an author or creator. We have to use that entity
of work relationship to put that in. If that was confusing, sorry. I
will take a look at it.
>> All right. That brings us back to the end of our time.
Amanda, we want to thank you. We want to thank our audience. You guys
were great. Join us for the next session. We will be getting the
archive on the slides sent out to you. I hope everyone has a wonderful
day. Amanda, any final thoughts before we wrap?
>> No, thank you. Thank you, Adam and Kate for the assist.
Great to have Adam here and have -- be able to appeal to a higher power.
[Laughter]
Yeah, and there are things like where these things are going
to go. What subfields they go in and all that is going to be -- is
going to be dependent on what the program for cooperative cataloging
decides and in conjunction with MARC folks. Guidance that comes out on
that one when decision is made. For now, do your best.
>> All right. Have a great day. Have a great day, everyone.
And we look forward to talking with you soon.
>> Thank you so much.
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