Presenting bibliographic families: Designing an FRBR-based prototype using information visualization

Despite the importance of bibliographic information systems for discovering and exploring library resources, some of the core functionality that should be provided to support users in their information seeking process is still missing. Investigating these issues, the purpose of this paper is to design a solution that would fulfil the missing objectives.

Building on the concepts of a work family, functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) and information visualization, the paper proposes a model and user interface design that could support a more efficient and user-friendly presentation and navigation in bibliographic information systems.

The proposed design brings together all versions of a work, related works, and other works by and about the author and shows how the model was implemented into a FrbrVis prototype system using hierarchical visualization layout.

Although issues related to discovery and exploration apply to various material types, the research first focused on works of fiction and was also limited by the selected sample of records.

The model for presenting and interacting with FRBR-based data can serve as a good starting point for future developments and implementations.

With FRBR concepts being gradually integrated into cataloguing rules, formats, and various bibliographic services, one of the important questions that has not really been investigated and studied is how the new type of data would be presented to users in a way that would exploit the true potential of the changes.