FRBR

From The Big Picture Wiki

FRBR – Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records

This, like many shorthand references, has metamorphosed from its original meaning. Created in 1998 by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), FRBR is a conceptual model of book metadata that breaks a book down into the following entities: Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item. The Work is the intellectual property – the ideas that make up “Alice in Wonderland”, for example. The Expression is the intellectual or artistic realization of the Work. The Manifestation is the book – the physical manifestation of the Expression – or the movie, or any other artistic manifestation. The Item is further downstream from the Manifestation, and is typically where the ISBN gets assigned – the paperback, the hardcover, the large print edition, etc. (In the case of the movie it would be the DVD, the digital download, the VHS.)

What does it accomplish?

FRBR allows different items to be linked together at a higher level. So if you type “Alice in Wonderland” into a search box, you’ll get “Alice in Wonderland”, “Deconstructing Alice in Wonderland”, “Chess and Mathematics in Alice in Wonderland”, etc. By clicking on any one of these, you should get a further breakdown of those titles – hardcover, paperback, etc. – and you shouldn’t have to go looking anywhere else for those items.

In addition to solving search problems, establishing a relationship between a work and its items allows publishers to track royalties better. Instead of tracking each individual ISBN, a publisher can track at the work level. Thus royalties for the audiobook version, the digital audio version, the book-with-plush version, the paperback, the large-print, can all be tracked simultaneously.

Who uses it?

In addition to libraries, e-commerce databases have been using versions of this for quite some time. Online booksellers, data aggregators, and book distributors commonly use this sort of format, linking ISBNs to a work level. It saves a great deal of data entry, and allows the book information to be organized efficiently.

--Ljnd 12:57, 11 June 2007 (EDT)