Functional requirements for bibliographic records: From a conceptual model to application and system development

Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba are the recipients of an IMLS Leadership grant titled " Research and Development of FRBR-Based Systems to Effectively Support User Tasks and Facilitate Information Seeking. " M any library catalogs and other information retrieval systems today do not support all the functions of the catalog as stated over a century ago by Cutter [1] and, within the last decade, by Lubetzky [2]. Past studies cite the failure to collocate all versions of the same work and the decision to ignore bibliographic relationships between different works and among expressions and manifestations of the same work as the reason for this lack of functionality [3]. In an effort to ease users' difficulties in searching catalogs, library communities have begun to incorporate the ideas within IFLA's Final Report on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) [4]. The foundation of FRBR is the distinction of four bibliographic entities (Group 1): work, expression, manifestation and item (IFLA, 1998). FRBR is a conceptual, entity-relationship model; it is open to various interpretations and implementations. Thus, those currently implementing all or part of the FRBR model have taken different approaches with respect to aspects such as user interface and display, system features, FRBR model focus, collection and other technical system implementation details. A survey of current system development, implementation efforts and different applications of the FRBR model is needed in order to gain a better understanding of these activities, solve application issues and plan for more successful FRBR projects in the future. This paper provides a brief overview of the types of collections and settings to which FRBR has been applied and existing literature that has previously examined FRBR application to some of these types of collections and settings. In addition, a brief overview of current system development efforts and supporting tools for creating FRBR-based systems and data is provided. FRBR Application FRBR can be applied to all kinds of settings and collections, both format-based and domain-specific. Noerr, Goossens, Matei, Otten, Peruginelli and Witt [5] list a number of benefits for both the end user of a library catalog and the library staff, including easier searching, focused results, clustering at the work level, understanding and using bibliographic references and better navigation for end users. Among the benefits for library staff, the authors list better placement of data in records, easier copy cataloging and sharing of records and adding new data such as rights …