Functional requirements for bibliographic records: FRBR: The end of the road or a new beginning

Maja Žumer is an associate professor of library and information science at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). Her research interests include design and evaluation of information retrieval systems, end-user interfaces and, recently, the FRBR model, particularly implementation aspects. She is a member of the IFLA FRBR Review Group, the chair of the Working Group for “Guidelines for national bibliographies in the digital age” and co-chair of FRSAR working group. She can be reached by email at Maja.Zumerff.uni-lj.si. F unctional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) is the conceptual model of the bibliographic universe developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). The final report [1] was approved in 1997 and published in 1998. Interestingly enough, after almost 10 years, we still most often refer to FRBR as “the new library model.” This can be explained by the fact that there are not many real-life implementations of FRBR. Indeed, the model is often seen as (only) an interesting intellectual exercise, while cataloging practices stay the same. We need to remember that current cataloging rules are still based on the Paris Principles [2] (which were agreed upon and accepted in 1961) and our current catalogs are, in fact, only an electronic replica of a card catalog, for which reason they have often been criticized (for instance, by the University of California Libraries [3] and Marcia Bates [4]). Yet there still seems to be some reluctance by the library community to implement FRBR. Several factors may contribute to this, some of which are listed below in no particular order: