More potent than FRBR
Dan Chudnov made a blog post on 1 January called On Borders, and said:
The answer was stated, if I’m not mistaken (sorry, I don’t have an exact reference, does anyone know?), at the turn of the 19th century, which makes it an unfulfilled, three-century-spanning statement of user requirements more potent than FRBR: that libraries must provide users with the ability to search and browse the whole bibliographic universe, and keep a locally-optimized subset of that universe close at hand….
That premise, the access to the whole bibliographic universe piece, is utterly unfulfilled in every library I know well today. In its place we manage barriers in information-space which evoke the same kinds of metaphors.
FRBR’s user tasks certainly handle the first half of that answer: find, identify, select, and obtain. The second half is beyond FRBR’s scope (it’s functional requirements for bibliographic records, after all). I don’t know what source he’s thinking of, but in the nineteenth century or now, that subset, no matter what you did with it, would have to be a small one. The bibliographic universe is large, but every library has a piece of it, specially arranged and optimized for its users, and what they don’t have, they can help you find.