Functional requirements for bibliographic records – FRBR: an introduction

Abstract

Librarianship studies related with descriptive representation or cataloguing has an historic record of specialists meetings trying to establish standards of documents description, related to rules and formats. After 40 years of the Paris Declaration of Principles, in 1961, it started a re-examination of the cataloguing practices and rules, under the responsibility of a study group from the Cataloguing, Classification and Indexing Section of IFLA – International Federation Library Associations and Institutions. The result was the final report: FRBR - Functional requirements for bibliographic records. The FRBR represents a significant improvement in the bibliographic representation area. It was publish in 1982, presenting concepts and definitions of entities, relationships and attributes, giving a new look of the bibliographic object, focalizing users and their actions. The model became the object of theses, dissertations, permanent study groups, seminary issue and a research subject internationally. Proposing different kind of relationships, the FRBR proposed a gathering of similar entities, offering a larger number of options to the user who search for information into the bibliographic records. With all that international discussion and uses as a model for bibliographic software, in Brazil there is not a single record of FRBR been treated as an important issue. This paper presents the FRBR model and some considerations about it, as a proposition for discussion of the bibliographic description future worldwide and the creation of the International Cataloguing Code.