Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal, E-mail: {hugo.manguinhas, nuno.freire, jlb}@ist.utl.pt | Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Rua Alves Redol, n° 9, 1000-029 Lisboa, Portugal | The European Library, The National Library of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexanderhof 5, 2509 LK The Hague, Netherlands | Instituto Politécnico de Portalegre, Praça do Município, 7301-901, Portalegre, Portugal, E-mail: jmachado@estgp.pt
Note: [] Corresponding author.
Abstract: This paper describes an experiment exploring the hypothesis that 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, was able to process, enrich and present that list in a more relevant way for the user. This service pre-processes the records of a traditional online catalogue in order to build a semantic structure following the FRBR model. The service also explores web search features that 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. We 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 out a questionnaire after using a traditional online catalogue and the new service, both with the same bibliographic collection. The analysis of the results supports the hypothesis that FRBR can be implemented for resource discovery in a non-intrusive way, reusing the data of any existing traditional bibliographic system.
