Frbrisation : towards a bright new future

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) conceptual model is beginning to gain recognition. This paper presents FRBR including possibilities and limitations of current standards and practices in terms of expressing the FRBR model. It is claimed that national bibliographies should benefit the most from FRBR, as they contain large quantities of high quality bibliographic data on many works with multiple versions. The paper is in part based on the results of frbrisation of Slovenian national bibliography and two other bibliographic databases. National bibliographies are an important source of information about the intellectual production of a nation. However, the records of these bibliographies are created following rules and practices that initially were developed with the old fashioned card catalogue in mind, which limits the usability and reusability of this information for new applications in the digital environment. To increase the value of national bibliographies there is a need for information about bibliographic resources that can fully serve as machine interpretable and reusable knowledge about bibliographic resources. One of the possible solutions is the use of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) conceptual model.