Supporting multilingual bibliographic resource discovery with Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records

This paper reports an experiment exploring the hypothesis that an innovative application of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) principles can complement traditional bibliographic resource discovery systems in order to improve the user experience. A specialized service was implemented that, when given a plain list of results from a regular online catalogue, it is able to process, enrich and present that list in a more relevant way for the user. This service preprocesses the same records of the online catalogue, in order to build a semantic structure following the FRBR model. The service also explores features from web search which have been revolutionizing the way users conceptualize resource discovery, such as relevance ranking and metasearching. This work was developed in the context of the TELPlus project, and processed nearly one hundred thousand bibliographic and authority records, in multiple languages, and originating from twelve European national libraries. This paper describes the architecture of the service, and the main challenges faced, especially concerning the extraction and linking of the relevant FRBR entities from the bibliographic metadata produced by the libraries. The service was evaluated by end users, who filled a questionnaire after using the new service and a traditional online catalogue, both with the same bibliographic collection. The analysis of the results supports the hypothesis that FRBR can be feasible with the existing bibliographic data, opening the doors for its application to any existing traditional bibliographic system.