Hickey, Levels of FRBR
Another day, another link to an OCLC blogger. Thom Hickey posted Levels of FRBR yesterday. He discusses how much energy it takes to implement FRBR and the problem of showing results to users clearly and understandably. These are two key questions.
At the high end you get specialized databases such as AustLit, the Australian literature catalog (which unfortunately you need a log-in to use), where they’ve gone to a lot of work to make sure they know who everyone is and understand the different editions of an author’s work. Just below that there are systems like FictionFinder here at OCLC that work with existing bibliographic information, but do extensive processing of the data to come as close as possible to a real FRBR understanding of the records.