New Concepts: Fictitious and Non-human Personages (Transcript)

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ALA-FICTITIOUS AND NON-HUMAN PERSONAGES
JULY 31, 2019
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>> Hi, everyone this is Dan Freeman. We are
going to get started. I know for most of you
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www.alastore.ala.org. And with that, I'm going
to turn things over to Amanda. She is the health
sciences cataloger at the University of Missouri.
She was a member of the RSC group as well. I'll
turn things over to you, Amanda.
>> Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining me
today. If you're not sure where you are, today
we are going to talk about RDA and fictitious and
what we're call non-human personages. If you're
sitting there thinking, well, why would a health
sciences cataloger be interested in non-human
personages, I ask myself too. That's the
high-level cataloging committee that meets at ALA
meetings to basically discuss issues with the
rules and anything having to do with the
cataloging community. What happened and how I
got on this track, was I was -- medical Library
Association to the CCDA. So most of the
associations that you're probably members of,
public libraries, et cetera, have a member who
sits on that committee. And Adam Shift from the
University of Washington had submitted a paper
identifying an issue with RDA in that alternative
identities for corporations, so when a
corporation name has an alternative identity,
there weren't really any rules in RDA for that.

There were rules for alternate identities for
individuals but not corporations. An example is
sometimes rock bands, for example, they want to
show up and play small venues so they don't
advertise themselves as being who they are.
Another one which is not safe for work so I'm not
going to mention it here. Lucas film reserved a
bunch of rooms in England when it was going to
film one of the Star Wars sequels. How do you
link some of the names that come up in
bibliographic entities. So we kind of started
this task force to look at how to get rules into
RDA -- we eventually ended up extending it to
fictitious bodies as well because it was
frequently hard to determine what was anality at
that time identity and what was a fictitious
identity. For those of you who have been around
long enough to remember the Geronimo Stilton wars
-- the fictitious mouse of children's books be an
author since he was a fictitious person and
people said no, he's not real, it has to be
somebody else but the publisher is adamant that
Geronimo Stilton exists and therefore he writes
the books so what do you do with that. This was
the background on what was going on at that time.
Now, right around the same time, the 3R project
for RDA was announced with the anticipated
publishing of the Library Reference Model from
IFLA, and the changes that were going to need to
be made to RDA if RDA was going to adopt that
reference model as its basis.
So the task force moved therefore, because
with the RDA and wanting to fast track the
changes and get this done, they basically closed
any sort of commenting or any sort of requests
for alternatives for RDA. This was taken up as a
task force by the RSC, the RDA steering
committee. So I basically moved my chairing of
my committee for CCDA to chairing basically the
same committee with most of the same people at
the RSC level. And as part of the RSC plus
program which was the RDA steering committee plus
the -- you've heard some of the discussions and

we'll hear more in this series from some of the
people working on some of the individual problems
that needed to be worked out at the RSD level.
That's how this all came about.
That's the background of it.
And so I was the head of what started as the
Fictitious Entities Working Group and we started
to tackle this problem. That was some
background.
What is the problem?
The problem is the Library Reference Model.
No, I don't want to say that. The problem is
that the Library Reference Model has identified
entities. And so this is a very typical straight
out of the Library Reference Model, a diagram of
the entities and the hierarchy of the Library
Reference Model. So it starts with res. Those
are refined into categories, so subcategories or
subentities of entities. So we have the WEMI,
the work expression manifestation item. And what
was new was the Library Reference Model --
creation batch resource that is of interest in
bibliographic analysis. And the agent is then
divided into a person or collective agent and a
collective agent is further divided into families
or corporate bodies. So that kind of makes
sense.
So the RDA took that model and made
refinements on it. The Library Reference Model
is made to be extensible. So you can extend it
and add things to it as long as you adhere to the
basic structure and rules of the model. So it's
meant to be refined into more categories and
communities that use the Library Reference Model
can refine the model the way they need to for it
to work for them. The RDA decided to modify res
meaning everything. Res in the Library Reference
Model can literally be anything that can possibly
be imagined by human imagine. So fictitious, not
fictitious, real, not real, concept, whatever,
any possible thing that your brain can come up
with can be a res. Under RDA, the RDA entity has
to be any RDA thing. So what that means is in

order for an RDA entity to be valid, it has to be
a work, expression, manifestation or item. It
has to be an agent. It has to be a place or time
span or a nomen. So all of these things that are
subclasses of the RDA entity can be an RDA
entity.
Nothing outside of this can be.
So one thing you'll notice right away is that
this RDA model doesn't include subjects, for
example. So something like if you have a book on
trucks, a children's book on trucks, the subject
is trucks. Trucks don't fit anywhere in this
model because they are not. They're just a
thing.
There's a reason for this. The reason is
traditionally we've divided cataloging up into
two main parts with subparts. So ACR2 and the
cataloging codes in RDA are about description and
access. They are not about subject analysis.
Subject analysis and classification have always
been a separate thing from the resource
description and access part. For those of you
who remember cataloging class or catalogers or
teach cataloging, know we have the description on
one hand and subjects on the other hand. All of
those things that aren't one of these entities in
RDA are not covered by the overreaching RDA
entity if that makes sense. In the Library
Reference Model they are covered because res
covers everything. In the LRM, subjects can be
covered under that res category. Agents in the
LRM and this is a little bit different in the
past, an agent has to be an entity capable of
exercising responsibility relationships relating
to works, manifestations, et cetera. What this
means is that an agent has to be a real person or
collective of real people.
The LRM actually spells this out where it
defines a person as an individual human being,
and it's restricted to real persons live or are
assumed to have lived. They are not asking for a
birth certificate but it's a generally agreed
idea that this person probably lived. So Homer,

you can argue whether Homer was a collective of
oral poets or was one person, but we kind of
assume that Homer in whatever format was real and
existed and actually wrote something. Under this
definition, fictional, literary or purely
legendary figures are not persons. So a book
that's purported to be written by Kermit the Frog
or the Spirit of the Archduke Ferdinand or
whoever you want to come up with, Jane Austen is
a mystery character. We do have a lot of
examples of animals who in some way seem to have
creator responsibility for things and resources.
By the same token, collective agents are persons,
so people real or assumed to have been real,
acting together as a unit. And so families and
corporations, conferences, all of those things
where people get together and act as a group are
considered agents, but again, they have to be
real. They have to have some sort of connection
and some sort of agency with production, writing,
creation of whatever the bibliographic resource
of the interest is.
So real people.
So what about non-humans?
This is a problem. In the LRM agents have to
be humans or collectives of humans. This leaves
out a whole bunch of things that we deal with in
bibliographic records that don't fall under this
category. Animals, for example. The
aforementioned Geronimo still ton, Billy the dog
who had her biography in -- during the Bush
years, we've had various famous animals write
their biographies, they're less facetious
examples. Things like Koko the gorilla,
certainly individual whale songs because marine
biologists can identify whales that way. None of
those things can be agents under the Library
Reference Model. But we still have them showing
up in resources that are purported to be
creations of these beings. So what do we do with
that?
So in the Library Reference Model, if you
were just using that, the highest level

relationship that you can have in the model is
res, so a thing, has an association with another
thing. That's not a real -- it's certainly not a
very helpful association. It doesn't tell you in
what way, but it basically says that thing A
somehow has an association with thing B.
And that's true. We can say that this table
belongs to me. This table has an association to
me in some way. And then belongs to is a refine
and imprisonment of that highest level
Association of res. So for example, subject of
work is a refine and imprisonment of the has
association. Thomas the tank has an association
with train, so therefore, trains are the subject
of Thomas the Tank Engine, the work, or the work
has the subject train.
Res has appellation nomen. So remember,
anything we can imagine or think about. And this
is where you start getting very metaphysical, but
-- this is a part to me is fascinating, but it is
definitely on an out there level. It's more
philosophy than anything. We can't talk about
things unless we give them names. So the res of
me, who is also the agent me, who is the person
me, who is the nomen me, those are all
abstractions. You can't talk about me, who I am,
until you give me the name of Amanda. It's that
way with anything. We could just say thing, but
then thing doesn't describe much. So we can say
we are not going to name the table, we are going
to can call it a thing but in that moment we've
given the table a nomen thing. In the Library
Reference Model for something like an animal who
is given some sort of creative responsibility by
the creators of that resource, you can say Koko
the gorilla, who's a res, has an association with
the film Koko the gorilla who talks. That's a
res, Koko is a res, and you can link those two
things together.
And then you can say Koko the gorilla has the
appellation, Koko the gorilla, she sadly died in
2018 so there is a closing date on 2018 on that
that I did not get. In this case, we're relating

things to the nomens or more correctly the nomen
strings of these bodies.
So the RDA approach, RDA didn't implement
res. So there's no way to incorporate subjects
into the model to start with, let alone
legendary, non-fictional, non-human personages.
RDA is dealing with access and not description
analysis. That was the decision that was made.
I know there's some talk in chat that I'm
noticing about -- I just want to say that we've
talked about this ad nauseum and hashed it out
and I will get to the part where I talk about
ground rules and that was something that was a
ground rule that animals don't have agency
according to the model and we can't give them
agency. People can disagree with it, I totally
get that, but at this point that was beyond the
ability of the task force to do anything about or
change. That was one of the bedrock ground rules
we were going to start with. Don't shoot the
messenger. That was what we were given -- they
said these are the ground rules and you have to
proceed from here. I just want to make that
disclaimer. Thanks, Bob. The RDA didn't
implement res. So it can't talk about anything
that isn't one of those specific RDA entities
that are defined explicitly in RDA.
Now, at first we thought maybe we can get to
it through the nomen, which the nomen is the
spirit, the being, the body, the metaphysical
thing behind the nomen string the name that we
call it. But a nomen is an RDA entity. And
since RDA entities -- since non-human personages
aren't included in the RDA entity and nomens only
refer to RDA entities, we can't really say that
non-human personages have a relationship to a
nomen because they don't have a relationship to
any other entity in the RDA, if that makes sense.
It gets a little sticky, but I found flowcharts
and diagrams and scribbling helps figure it out
sometimes.
So here we are with RDA and non-human
personages and fictitious entities. This is our

problem to work on, yay us. There were some
assumptions that we had going in. One was that
we wanted access points for fictitious entities
and non-human personages that we were making.
Geronimo was good to have in a record whether he
was real or not real. By that token, the
principles that we work by, the bedrock
foundations of cataloging of collocation and
authority control had to be maintained. If we
had a fictitious or non-human personage that we
needed to deal with, we wanted authority control
to apply to it just like real people and we
wanted to make sure that somebody could look up
one of these personages and be able to find
everything that involved them in some sort of
way.
It's also very important to note that the
Library Reference Model doesn't talk about
authority files. So what individual cataloging
communities and in our case, our community in
Canada, not North America, in the United States,
Canada has their own very fine authority system.
But in the United States, the Library Reference
Model national authority file is the file we all
use. Our community, the United States community
kind of uses the LC national authority file. So
that's our community.
So Library of Congress, in the community that
uses that file, can kind of decide on their own
what they think is appropriate to be in that
authority file. The Library Reference Model
doesn't say that you can't have an authority file
of subjects, but you can have a name authority
file that has fictitious entities or non-human
beings or legendary figures in it. It just says
that those can't be called creators of
bibliographic resources.
So we do have some room to maneuver.
So our task force also has some constraints.
We had to accept the model. And believe me,
there were very strong feelings on all sides
about this. There were many, many discussions
about the decision that it had to be a real

person in order to be an agent and all that. And
the bottom line was that was the parameter. So
that could not be changed.
We couldn't add fictitious entities or
non-humans for a couple reasons for a new entity.
One, because they're outside the scope of RDA.
I'm sorry, is the slide not showing?
>> Hi, Amanda, it's working fine for us.
>> Okay. So we couldn't add a new entity.
One, because it doesn't fit under the scope of
RDA. It's outside the scope. And two, because
any new entity that you add, and as someone who
has had -- I can say that I don't know the number
-- we have I want to say, 11, 14, I haven't
counted the number of entities recently -- but we
have a certain minimum number of entities, but
then we have an amazing amount of elements or
attributes and relationships that go with each of
those entities. So anytime you add a new entity
to the model, it's almost a algorithmic leap in a
number of other things in the model that have to
be changed or added. So it's expensive and it's
also probably not particularly necessary in a lot
of ways.
So that, for a lot of reasons, was not
something that was able to be done. So we
couldn't just add a new entity and say, oh, let's
have a fictitious non-human personage as an
entity and both a theoretical reason that wasn't
going to happen.
We couldn't just modify existing relationship
designates or existing relationships to fix
non-human personages because the model is
hierarchical so those relationships that exist
belong to those entities and you can't extend
those out and say they are going to work in other
entities. It's each relationship should be the
domain and I'm not sure if I'm using that right.
I'm not great on models. But it basically has to
belong to one entity and one entity only.
Whatever solution we came up with had to be
compatible with linked data because that seems to
be the way, hopefully, that we're going, or at

least going in some non-MARC -- because RDA is
standard in platform neutral. It couldn't just
be a suggestion that was going to work for MARC,
even though that's what we're all working with
now, but it had to work in other systems. It has
to work in XML and a linked data environment and
triples. So we couldn't really come up with a
uniquey MARC solution to those. That being said,
I'm going to give examples later in MARC because
I think all of us, as examples, that's how we all
think and that's what we're used to seeing, but
be aware it's not restricted to MARC it's just
we're using that for the moment so my examples
tend to be taken from there. When we embarked on
this endeavor, which started as the Fictitious
Entities Working Group, we realized that
fictitious entities as a label was problematic.
Not all persons are fictitious. My dog is a
non-human person, lilly, but she is not
fictitious. Sometimes I wish she was, like when
she barks at 4:00 in the morning. The idea of
fictitiousness of any individual or any
personages may vary between different user groups
or cultural communities. For example, some
communities don't believe that Moses was a real
person. Other people have very strong feelings
that Moses was a real person. When you start
labeling things as fictitious, is the arc age el
Gabriel fictitious or not fictitious. Is he
non-human?
Yeah, definitely, he's an angel. Is he real?
That's greatly going to depend on your
philosophy and cultural group. The other problem
with fictitious entities is that in the Library
Reference Model and RDA, it has a very specific
meaning. It's a category of things in the model.
Using fictitious entity as a catch all
description was confusion. We didn't want to
confuse those terms. We started talking about
fictitious and non-human personages because a
personage definition is that it can be anything
that's given person like qualities whether real
or not. RDA so far has settled on fictitious and

non-human appellations, so names, basically, for
fictitious and non-human things. That works as
well as anything, I suppose. We all know what we
are talking about so I'm not going to fret what
they decide to call it. What do we do when we
have non-human personages of cases. One thing is
when there's a clear use of non-human or
fictitious personage as a pseudonym for a real
person. Geronimo Stilton is the pen name of a
human writer. Kermit the Frog, Millie the Dog,
Sherlock Holmes, whoever the fictitious person
is, there's a real person behind them who is
ghost writing.
And then there's a second category of things
where there are non-humans who are performing in
an agent-like capacity but we can't say they're
fictitious. So animals are the biggest example.
Any animal who's performing in a film, any kind
of animal communication, and I should say with
animal communication, we are not talking about
recordings of say general bird song. We are
talking about communications between animals at
the individual level. So Koko the Gorilla
signing is definitely animal communication.
Humpback whale songs where the whale songs can be
attributed to particular individuals is one of
the types of animal communication.
Bird song just in general would be like crowd
noise. You couldn't really -- there are, for
people who do music and sound recordings, there
are sound recordings of crowd noise to be used
for things. You can really say the crowd is the
creator of that. In the same way general bird
song wouldn't be the creator, but definitely
things that can be attributed to individuals or
very specific groups of individuals, a particular
whale pod, for example, would be.
And then there's a whole bunch of legendary
non-human personages like spirits, angels and
gods who are acting as creators of works. And we
do have examples of these right now in both the
authority file and the bibliographic records and

databases. So we are not talking about something
that's so unusual that it never happens.
So out of the new RDA beta toolkit, if you
look under the guidance, I think is what they're
calling it, there's a nice section now on
fictitious entities and non-human appellations.
So it says that the appellation, and you'll
notice that they are not saying nomen because
nomen doesn't apply here, it may appear in a
manifestation and title responsibility statement
or a subtitling of that. And also in reference
sources.
An appellation of a fictitious entity, again,
so something like Geronimo still ton that doesn't
exist, is assumed to be a pseudonym of an agent
in one of those categories. A non-human entity
that is associated with a statement of
responsibility is treated to -- and this is the
crux of it -- an entity that is external to RDA.
So an animal, a legendary person, a god, an
angel, anything like that is an entity that is
external, so is not included within the purview
of the RDA. So RDA is basically saying we don't
really deal with these entities; we only deal
with real things. That being said and the
assumption being made that we want to include
these entities in some sort of way in
bibliographic records, how do we make that
happen?
How do we reconcile those two things?
So just to go back to why we are talking
about this, and why we even bother, is users'
tasks and expectations. And the thing to
remember is that user encompass all ages and all
educational levels. We have to accommodate --
I'm at a medical school at a four-year R1
graduate degree bestowing institution, so most of
my users are relatively intelligent, I would say,
super intelligent people who have very high
education levels. Our catalog works great for
that. But our catalogs also need to work for the
sixth grader who wants the newest chapter book in
the series they're reading or the six year old

who wants every book by Geronimo still ton. They
have to be able to find their stuff too. They're
all potential users of the catalog and they all
have to be accommodated. So going back, remember
every reader their book, every book its reader
and mostly save the time of the reader. While
we're arguing semantics, which we need to do, we
also have to keep in mind that we have real
people out there who need to find things and we
have to keep that in mind.
So some user task examples, like I said, a
preschool kid wants to find the latest Geronimo
Stilton -- how do we find all the books for that
kid?
A researcher maybe who's doing their thesis
on Sherlock Holmes after Arthur cone an Doyle.
Now, John Watson isn't real, apologies to Martin
Freeman and other wat sons out there. But he is
the purported writer of the Sherlock Holmes
stories.
Fans of dogs want to reed Millie Bush's
biography. And maybe a film buff wants to watch
all the movies that had Astathe dog the way that
we suggested that this be approached and it seems
to be the way it's adopted is that non-human
personages that are clearly pseudonyms just be
treated that way. There's no qualitative
difference between a pseudonym that sounds like a
real person, like Woody Allen who sounds like a
person or Richard Castle who sounds like a person
versus a non-human pseudonym. Just because
someone decides to call themselves Geronimo
Stilton and say they're a mouse doesn't make it
different versus a person who uses a pseudonym
who sounds like a real person. And we don't want
to parse what is real sounding enough. Geronimo
Stilton is a pseudonym -- it's not very clear if
she's still writing them, if there are other
people writing them. As I said, the Italian
publisher keeps that under wraps. They like to
keep the Santa clause element for kids like the
Geronimo Stilton is real. John Watson is a
pseudonym for Nicholas Meyer but John Watson as a

nomen string is a pseudonym that's been used for
not only Nicholas Meyer but for other people as
well. And Millie is a pseudonym for Barbara
Bush. So in this case, Larissa asked a question
and this is a good question and I'm going to cut
in here. Yes, in this case they are nomens
because in this case the pseudonym is just an
alternate nomen for a real human being. So they
are agents because it's simply Elizabeth A Dami
is calling herself something different but she's
still a person and therefore an agent. So even
though she may have separate nomen string that
relate to her, she's still real. Millie the dog,
for example, Millie was smart but I'm sure she
didn't write her book or read her book. Barbara
Bush, therefore, is really the author. And she's
just using Millie her dog as a pseudonym for the
work that she has put forth. In this case this
is covered under RDA clearly. And the same way
that Richard Bachman is a pseudonym for Stephen
King. We treat them exactly as we would treat
any pseudonym used for a creator of a resource.
So RDA just says this basically. If an
appellation of a fictitious personage appears in
a statement of responsibility, You-Know-Who the
real person is. In this case, you know who the
agent is. So record -- you have two choices.
You can record the name, the appellation, as a
pseudonym of the agent and the authority record.
Or you can relate an entity to an agent using an
appropriate relationship entity. So you can, in
this case, the resource entity would be Geronimo
Stilton would have his own authority record and
you would relate the nomen string with his own
authority record to the nomen string of the nomen
Elizabeth A dame and her own authority records so
you would make that relationship because it's
simply an alternate name for a real person.
So for example, if John Watson, the memoir of
John Watson as edited by Nicholas Meyer, you
could record the author as Nicholas Meyer and
relate the pseudonym or nomen string, John Watson
to him, in the authority record. Or you could

record John Watson as the author and then relate
John Watson's authority record to Nicholas Meyer.
And that's the way I think most people do it now.
So if you look at a record, which we will do,
actually, I have an example here. Here's
Geronimo Stilton, so Geronimo Stilton is probably
the pseudonym of Elizabeth Dami, and I'm going to
speak MARC now, you could have a 400
cross-reference, Geronimo Stilton and her
authority record, or you can -- Geronimo Stilton
can have his own authority record and you can
make a 500 cross-reference between Elizabeth Dami
and Geronimo Stilton and use the relationship
such as real identity of person or real identity
of person of because those are reciprocal.
Looking at a MARC record, to make some sense out
of this, this is the typical way, I think, that
this has been dealt with and this continues to be
valid. So Geronimo Stilton is going to be the
author in your bibliographic record. And then in
your authority record, there's going to be a
cross-reference both to him as a -- which method
you choose to use is going to depend on how your
cataloging unit decides to implement it, the same
way we do with Library of Congress, LCPCC policy
statements. You can decide to pick what policy
statement or what option you want to follow. So
in Liz beta's authority record, you're going to
have the cross-reference to Stilton with real --
real identity of -- that's pretty
straightforward. That's not any different than
anything we're doing right now.
So what do you do if you have a fictitious
personage who you know is clearly fictitious and
they're in a statement of are responsibility and
you don't know who they are?
So what you are going to do is basically do
the same thing that we've always done when we
have sued anonymous authors and we don't know who
the person is. And this is, we know, especially
with early cataloging records, if anybody does
rare book cataloging, we know we have a lot of
works out there by a lady or by the author of,

because that's the only information that we have.
So basically we are not going to do anything
different in this case either.
So you have -- here's Before you Leap by
Kermit the Frog, I kind of object because I think
Kermit the Frog is totally real, is a pseudonym
for somebody.
And we don't know who it is. It could be
Brian Henson, probably not. It's probably a
ghost writer who is writing for the children's
television network or whatever. In this case,
you're going to record the fictitious entity
using an unstructured or structured description,
which means you put it in a statement of
responsibility and leave it at that, or you could
add a structured description so you could add the
access point to the record. And then you're
going to relate that to the resource using
whatever the appropriate relationship is going to
be.
So in this case, you would still have Kermit
the Frog, probably as a 100, although I have to
say this is still being discussed, nothing is
finalized, but again, in the same way that we
would have author of Sense and Sensibility or a
million other things relating to it, we know
there's a real person behind it, we just don't
know who it is. And later on, if we find out who
it is, we can relate the references together.
So in linked data, this is straightforward.
You have curse of the cheese pyramid, has the
author Geronimo Stilton and Geronimo Stilton is
the author of the Curse of the Cheese Pyramid.
And then you have the altered or real identity
relationship that's linking them together.
That's pretty straightforward. I would say at
this point anyway, it doesn't seem to be that
that is changing much.
So this is when we start getting into the
more sticky stuff. So what do we do with
non-human personages, that are real, purported to
be real or maybe even not purported to be real

that are creators in some way or seem to be
responsible the creation of a resource?
So this is bringing up baby, a great movie
from the 30s with Kathryn Hepburn and carry
Grant. She's the original manic pixie girl in
this. And this is Skipy, the dog. Skipy was in
a bunch of movies in the 20s and 30s. So
non-human animal creators and performers present
a special case.
They can't be agents, so you can't say
they're actors, you can't say they're writers or
authors. But they're also clearly not the
pseudonym of a real person they do perform tasks
and roles you would normally contribute to an
agent.
So RDA says when you have a non-human entity,
so this would be any of the cases where you have
an animal, a legendary personage, a god, angel,
anything like that, you have to relate that
entity, which, remember, is a non-RDA entity so
it's outside the scope of the RDA, to a resource
using one of these relationships. So for work,
you have related entity of work, of expression,
of manifestation, of item. So this is the RDA
equivalent of that very top level res is
associated to res sort of relationship, where
you're basically saying this is an entity --
again, it's probably using non-human entity in
here is a little confusing. But a non-human
personage which is not an RDA entity and is not
really in the scope of an RDA can still be
related to an RDA entity through this related
entity of item. So it's basically saying this
thing, which isn't an RDA entity is related to
work, expression, manifestation or item in some
sort of way, but we are not defining what that
is. So it's a very Broadway of linking those
things together.
So for example, Skipy the dog -- 20s and 30s.
He can't be listed as an actor because actor is
agent related. Agents are people.

He clearly acts in films and he's not a
pseudonym for a human agent. He's not a person
in a dog suit.
So RDA treats these as non-RDA entities as we
just saw, and it's basically the same way they
treat subjects, which are also outside the scope
of RDA. They are not saying they don't exist;
they're just saying RDA doesn't really deal with
these. And they've accommodated those by
relating them to resources using that related
entity-relationship.
The same way that with subjects you can use
subjects, which are entities outside of the RDA
entities as well, using the has subject is the
subject of a reciprocal relationship.
Here's Koko the Gorilla. This is her
authority record and the LC, perfectly valid.
And you see that these are all her alternate
nomens. I find this very touching. Fine animal
gorilla is actually what Koko called herself. So
we have her access point name, but then we have
as one of her alternate identities or alternate
nomens, we have fine animal gorilla, which is
what she referred to herself as. So right now,
if you look up the movie about her, the Gorilla
Who Talks, they chose to use this relationship of
on screen participants. Under RDA you would be
able to say use a 700 and say related entity of
work, Koko gorilla, 1971. So it isn't probably
the most perfect solution, but we got Koko in
there. Koko is searchable by name, she's in the
authority records. So if people of the to look
up everything that has Koko the gorilla in it,
they will being able to do that. I want to say
too, with MARC, even though supposedly the idea
of main entry has been a bit dep indicated, in
fact we still put, if it's an author, we still
put it at the top of the record, whereas if it's
an editor we put it at the bottom of the record
in the 700 field. Under linked data, how you
choose to arrange the elements in a bibliographic
record will be up to you. You'll be able to say
if it's an editor or author or whatever, we are

going to put that first. So right now, this 100,
700 distinction between what's a creator versus
what's a contributor, that sort of thing, is one
of these remnants that we're left with of MARC
and a legacy from AACR2 and main entry or
preferred entry. And I think that that, as we
get into different systems, non-MARC systems, I
think that's going to change. So the 100, 700s
are probably splitting hairs a little bit, but
this is a working framework by which we're going
at the moment.
So other slippery non-human-type things as I
like to call them, figures like gods, angels,
spirits and legendary characters and all those
things maintainer fall into one of these two
categories and usually they don't. This is where
we're getting into the weeds. It's one of the
things that, you know, I have to say -- I'm
trying to think, in my almost 15 years of
cataloging professionally if I've ever come
across having to do a spirit communication and I
haven't. That doesn't mean some of you out there
who don't do far weirder than I do haven't. They
do need to be accommodated. Whether a non-human
personage is seen as a pseudonym for a real
person or not is going to eventually have to be
determined by a cataloging agency that maintain
the authority files.
So whatever authority file you're using, and
again, locally you can also make different
decisions if you want to do that. As Kathy,
who's the chair of RSC now, will say this is an
implementation system, also known as this is the
cataloging agency who decides how they are going
to pick and how they are going to go with it. If
you want to say using authority files from the
Library of Congress, you'll have to go along with
the decision they make on this. The LC, I hope,
is going to be open to hearing people's opinions,
but ultimately they are going to make a decision
and if you're using their authority file you have
to go with that. Different culture groups may
have differing opinions on what constitutes real

or living or may have lived. Again, RDA, as
frustrating as it is for those of us who are used
to more solid rules, RDA deliberately is
non-directive about this. RDA, in a lot of ways,
recognizes that many different communities look
at things differently and in order for a model
like RDA to work for the most amount of people,
it has to be flexible. So in some communities
what's real and what's living or may have lived
may be different than in other communities. So
RDA doesn't have hard and fast rules on you
determine if somebody's lived by this way and if
it doesn't follow this -- no. They're saying we
are not going to deal with that. The
implementation in your community of this is going
to have to make those decisions on their own.
Just be aware that there's room for maneuvering
in here for different ways of dealing with it.
So here's a great example and I think
indicate James from the Library of Congress for
coming up with this. This is fun. Franchezzo,
who is a spirit, came down, in this case he's
given what we would call the main entry, probably
under the new system, he would get a 700 with
related entity of work, Franchezzo spirit.
This is in development but this is the way
the discussion is currently going. Because he's
not an agent and can't be in an agent's -- I'm
assuming Franchezzo is a male and because the 100
typically in MARC means creator and he can't be a
creator, we would use the 700. Again, MARC
hasn't been updated to accommodate this stuff.
Everything is not yet set and geld in stone.
Things are fluctuating so we'll see how this
shakes out, but this seems to be the direction of
how that's going.
In the same way, somebody was given a
visitation by the angel Gabriel, and in this
case, using this system, Gabriel would probably
move from the 100 to the 700 using that related
entity of work.
So that's a way to accommodate it. So the
implications for the national authority file, and

again, I want to thank Kate James for the next
few slides. She gave a presentation to -- she
gave me her slides to use so I'm using this with
her permission. So the Library of Congress is of
course talking about this.
And the implications for the national
authority file are that name authority records
for non-human personages can't be coded RDA
because they're not included as one of those RDA
entities.
And therefore, they also can't have agent
relationships to works, expressions and the WEMI
stack. Because of this, instructions for
identification of these can't come from RDA and
can't from the LCPCC policy statements on RDA
because, remember, they're entities outside the
RDA. They are not included in the RDA. So the
same way that policy decisions or any discussions
how to implement subject analysis in
bibliographic records has to come from a separate
set outside of RDA. So do these entities or
these non-human personages.
So Danger, Will Robinson!. Disclaimer from
LC, the following slides present ideas for how
this may be handled but LC has made no decisions
about this issue. What I'm going to give you in
the next two slides is the discussion and some
sort of thinking about what is going on at the
Library of Congress how to deal with this. It is
not set. It is not policy. It's not even
officially written down anywhere. But this is
the direction that it's going. I think the plan
is to get a white paper out for discussion, at
some point soon. I'm not going to say when
because I have no idea and I don't want to put
the thumb screws to Kate and her colleagues or
give them pressure on it. I don't know.
But these are the sorts of things that are
being talked about.
So to make it work, we would keep the
existing national authority records in the in the
national authority file and allow new national
authority files for -- if you need a fictitious

person it will be a subject heading that you can
apply that way.
There will be a new manual, yay, more
manuals!
I know you're all groaning out there. There
will be a new manual of construction for
constructing headings for non-human personages.
So those who follow NACO rules will get training
and instruction on how to construct those
headings. And they're thinking about a new
description convention, so that would mean that
the source code in the 040E which cannot be RDA
and the 0752 which says where the term came from,
will have new codes to be used.
So straight from Kate, you have you goy, who
was a jack Russellterier and he performs so he
will have to have a national authority file
record as a non-human personage to be put in
authority records. So these will be coded with
the new code. The working code they're using is
LC and HPS so I'm assuming Library of Congress,
non-human personages. And there would be new
codes. That code could also be added to the 75
to show where you got the term of what that thing
is from.
So in the case of a bib example, Uggie, my
story, so Uggie wrote an autobiography, he would
get a 600 because he's the subject, and he --
contributor to this -- or a related entity of
work, since contributor is a creator thing for
agents, but a non--- a related entity of work to
the work Uggie. So he would get that 700.
That's an example of what the thinking is. As
RDA continues to be developed, expect more
guidance on examples of FE/NHAs and keep tuned.
Again, just to reiterate once again, this stuff
is still being discussed and talked about.
Nothing has really been set yet so this is all
going to be hashed out in the next little while.
Again, I'm not -- hopefully months rather than
years, but we'll see what happens.
This is my best understanding and my best
guess as the former chair of the Fictitious

Entities Working Group. I make no promises. I
make no guarantees that this won't change, but at
the moment, this is what's happening. So
anything about how this comes about, who gets
input, all that stuff, way above my pay grade. I
can't influence any of that. If LC decides to do
something and decides to ask for input or
doesn't, I have no control over that. Sorry
folks. I would love to rule the world but that's
how it goes.
All I can say is keep tuned and expect there
to be more development of it. It's in the very
earliest stages of coming about. My final piece
of advice, and my -- isn't working but don't
panic. My big goal when I started this project
so many years ago was to make sure that there was
a way to get things like Geronimo Stilton into
bibliographic records so they would be available
for users to search on.
As I am more of an engineer than a theorist,
as long as they're in there and are searchable
and our searchers can find them, I'm not
particular personally on how that happens, but
there are definitely things that need to be --
that are going to need to be hashed out. The
good news is that I think in the beginning when
this came out, it would be like we are not going
to be able to have those in bibliographic
records. That is not happening, they are. It
might look different, but frankly when linked
data comes in it's going to be a whole new
ballgame. And I think with linked data we'll be
able to expand and there will be a lot more
choices that will be able to be implemented in
implementation in communities or local level so
you'll be able to make more choices how you want
things to show up and how you want to search
them.
So again, don't panic. And understand that
this is still in the development stages. If you
have questions, concerns, want input, whatever,
grab somebody on CCDA. We have representatives
who the RDA -- what are we calling ourselves?

The North American RDA group, who are on CCDA
who can pass on stuff.
So yeah, keep tuned. When you have -- this,
I'm sure, will be discussed at the PCC list and
at some point on the RDA list that are out there,
auto CAD that we all belong to, and if you have
strong feelings, by all means, this is your
chance. So if you get the chance and you want to
comment, please do. Easy for me to say, because
I don't have to implement it.
So that being said, on Amanda's cop out for
today, there's further reading. The slides are
going to be put up on slide share. Here's a few
things that I think might help. There's some
general RDA toolkit stuff that has little bits in
there and some things on how RDA's going to --
how the Library Reference Model is going to
impact RDA and some other standards.
And I will take questions until -- thank you.
North American RDA committee. NARDAC. I should
know that. My brain is now fried on talking too
much on fictitious entities and non-human
personages. My many, many many thanks to Kate
James, Gordon done sigher, Bob Maxwell, Kathie
Glennon, to all the people who have read my
slides and given advice. Kate in particular who
let me use her slides. If you have any
questions, my email is right on here. Feel free
to send me questions. I have to say, I could
answer unofficially as someone who kind of knows
about this stuff, but I can't speak to policy.
So you need to talk to the RDA folks or LC folks
about that. But if you have any questions, I
will do my best to answer them.
So thank you for being an attentive audience.
I know this is really out there stuff, and if you
stuck with me this long, thank you so much.
>> MODERATOR: All right, Amanda, we have
some questions. First question, are fictitious
names that do not claim to be authors treated the
same way?
>> No, those would purely -- if you had to,
for some reason, you wanted to include those,

they would probably be subjects, I would guess.
So you would just use the fictitious character.
Those characters are established in the name
authority file actually as for subject usage and
you would use those. I should say there's going
to be, for some things like Richard Castle, I
don't know if you're familiar with Nathan
Fillion, he was an author who wrote books and
then they started putting out books written by
Richard Castle so he has two authority names in
the authority file. One is for the fictitious
character that is used whenever something is
written about him for subject use. And then
there's his authority record that's used when
he's the pseudonym for the author who's writing
for them. That tells you if you want to use it
as a subject, you have to use the subject one.
There may be times there are two separate records
in there. Again, that's how it's going, but it
may change. I think that one probably won't
change but it's possible. At the moment, that
seems to be what's happening.
>> MODERATOR: All right. Next question.
Will authority records be coded so we can tell if
a non-person personage is not suitable for agency
agent relationships under RDA --
>> Yes, and you're going to see that LC and
HP whatever instead of the RDA which will tell
you that's not an RDA entity so therefore you
can't use that in the way you would use an RDA
entity. And again, I want to stress the very
preliminary nature of that. That's what LC is
talking about. For right now, just keep on doing
what you're doing.
So nobody -- please no one come from this
presentation and start changing the way you're
doing things because there hasn't really been the
official yes, we are going to do this. It's not
policy yet, it's just discussion.
>> MODERATOR: In your example on slide 44,
why wouldn't Franchezzo be treated as other
personages, that is a pseudonym?

>> Because here we're assuming -- this is
sort of ethical and theoretical on a cataloging
level. We have always -- the ethos of cataloging
-- creators at their word. So if a medium says
this wasn't me, this was the spirit of
Franchezzo, then we just believe them. So this
is one of those cases where we wouldn't say it's
a pseudonym, assuming the person was here to
defend themselves, they might say of course that
wasn't me, that was actually Franchezzo who was
actually speaking through me; I can't take
responsibility for that. I think the angel
Gabriel, this is a more modern example. So
Shanta Gabriel who is the medium, or the person
through human the message was delivered through
the angel Gabriel, I could see her saying but it
wasn't me, I didn't write this. The angel
Gabriel actually wrote this.
So this is one of the cases where we're
taking the word of the medium who says that it
wasn't them but it was someone speaking through
them.
So that's in that do no harm, take things as
they come, take people at their word kind of
ethics, ethos' cataloging is what I would get to.
>> MODERATOR: Next question.
How do relationship designators fit into this
scenario?
>> I don't know and that's a good question.
RDA's very much written from a linked data
perspective in some ways, or at least a non-MARC
perspective. So relationship designators have
been a way to establish those relationships
between different RDA entities or in some cases,
in the case if this is adopted for non-human
personages, non-entities. And the WEMI stack or
other RDA entities.
And so that's the way we have been able to
get those relationships or a representation of
those relationships in the MARC records. In a
linked data system, you wouldn't probably have
relationship designators. What you would have is
the actual relationships in the triples. What

you would see is instead of seeing something like
author in the triple, you would have something
like Carol comma Lewis is the author of
relationship Alice Adventures in Wonderland.
And vice versa. Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland has author Carol comma Lewis. So the
designator column -- would be inherent in the
relationship. So what the stopgap measure of
dealing with that?
I don't know. And I can't remember if we are
going to have a talk about that or not. Dan, are
we having a talk about that?
>> MODERATOR: I'm sorry. I think we are,
yeah. I'm sorry, I was reading through the
question as you were asking it.
>> Stay tuned to that. Kathie Glen
inanswers. Relationship designators are not
relationship elements. Like I said, they're the
relationships, the verb, rather than the noun.
And some of them have been created to point
outside of RDA so they have subject and the
related entity of work and those sorts of things.
Right now, yeah, that doesn't help with MARC, so
we're using those subfield Es to create
relationships. That isn't something I personally
worked on, but someone is in the next couple
weeks in the series, I think, going to talk about
that. I will find out about that when you guys
do. Outside my brief, sorry.
>> MODERATOR: No worries.
One more question on the list. So a
non-human entity can't be a person creator 100,
but it can be a person added entry, 700?
>> Yes. They are still not persons. 700s --
that's how, as Kathy pointed out, one of the 13
extra relationship elements that we have in there
their subjects and non-RDA entities like
non-human personages are going to be linked with
that relationship designator has relationship
entity of work or whatever. So there will be a
way to link those. But yeah, they are not
considered persons. Remember, RDA is standard
neutral, doesn't care about MARC, so it doesn't

care about 100s or 700s or whatever it is. It's
mostly our, in the cataloging community's sense,
the people who are working on this, way to figure
out how to deal with MARC legacy records until we
deal with the bigger problem on shifting to the
next one, the next thing that comes when it
comes.
>> MODERATOR: All right.
>> Everything is in flux. So yeah, just
hold on to your seats and wait for developments,
I guess, is all I can say.
>> MODERATOR: All right. Well, we are very
grateful for the presentation, Amanda, and we
look forward to seeing most of you back next
week.
Normally I ask at this point if you have any
closing thoughts but I think you just gave them.
>> Yeah, just stay tuned. And once again,
my disclaimer, realize this is all in flux and
may change. Some of it I'm a little more sure of
than other things, but I can guarantee there will
be changes. So for the moment, keep on doing
what you are doing. Proceed until apprehended is
my motto. Keep going.
>> MODERATOR: All right. Well, thank you very much,
Amanda. And thank you to our audience for your great
questions and interactions and discussion. And we will
look forward to seeing you at the event next week.
Have a great day, everyone

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New Concepts: Fictitious and Non-human Personages (Transcript)