Frad: A new approach to authority control

Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) and Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) were both developed by International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) to enable users to access the resources they need in library catalogs or other databases through the hierarchy of relationships between entities. FRAD is the extension of the well-known FRBR, but applied to authority rather than to bibliographic data. Authority control in bibliographic records is essential in providing consistent retrieval of resources through various access points. FRAD added six new entities: family, name, identifier, controlled access point, rules, and agency and it was designed for two different user groups: the information professional that creates the authority data and the user who accesses the authority data through online catalogs and databases. In this paper FRAD as a model is examined in detail to explicate more fully what it is and what it attempts to do? What benefits do we expect from an FRAD-based authority file?