Modeling Our Understanding, Understanding Our Models: The Case of Inheritance in FRBR

IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) presents a compelling and influential model of the “bibliographic universe.” However there are interesting variations between FRBR’s formal model and the narrative expositions of FRBR’s authors and explicators - that is, between the formal model and the framework as more broadly understood by the FRBR community. In this paper we argue that despite a widespread belief to the contrary, attribute inheritance down the “hierarchy” of Group 1 entities is inconsistent both with the formal model and with the general spirit of the project. We believe these observations reveal an ongoing uncertainty about the nature of bibliographic entities as well as difficulties in maintaining a clear and exact understanding of the models we are using to represent those entities - even when those models are our own creation

A User-Centered Functional Metadata Evaluation of Moving Image Collections

In this article, the authors report a series of evaluations of two metadata schemes developed for Moving Image Collections (MIC), an integrated online catalog of moving images. Through two online surveys and one experiment spanning various stages of metadata implementation, the MIC evaluation team explored a user-centered approach in which the four generic user tasks suggested by IFLA FRBR (international Association of Library Associations Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records) were embedded in data collection and analyses. Diverse groups of users rated usefulness of individual metadata fields for finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining moving images. The results demonstrate a consistency across these evaluations with respect to (a) identification of a set of useful metadata fields highly rated by target users for each of the FRBR generic tasks, and (b) indication of a significant interaction between MIC metadata fields and the FRBR generic tasks. The findings provide timely feedback for the MIC implementation specifically, and valuable suggestions to other similar metadata application settings in general. They also suggest the feasibility of using the four IFLA FRBR generic tasks as a framework for user-centered functional metadata evaluations