The IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records

Abstract

The formal charge for the IFLA study involving international bibliography standards was to delineate the functions that are performed by the bibliographic record with respect to various media, applications, and user needs. The method used was the entity relationship analysis technique. Three groups of entities that are the key objects of interest to users of bibliographic records were defined. The primary group contains four entities: work, expression, manifestation, and item. The second group includes entities responsible for the intellectual or artistic content, production, or ownership of entities in the first group. The third group includes entities that represent concepts, objects, events, and places. In the study we identified the attributes associated with each entity and the relationships that are most important to users. The attributes and relationships were mapped to the functional requirements for bibliographic records that were defined in terms of four user tasks: to find, identify, select, and obtain. Basic requirements for national bibliographic records were recommended based on the entity analysis. The recommendations of the study are compared with two standards, AACR and the Dublin Core, to place them into pragmatic context. The results of the study are being used in the review of the complete set of ISBDs as the initial benchmark in determining data elements for each format.