Multiple-Version Resources in Digital Libraries: Towards User-Centered Displays

The author reports findings from experiments with the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions’ (IFLA) Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) as applied to the domain of science fiction, Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions in the Online Computer Library Center’s (OCLC) WorldCat. The goal of the study is to gauge the characteristics of bibliographic entities under study, to examine types of relationships these entities exhibit, and to collocate bibliographic entities according to the FRBR group 1 hierarchy of entities identified as works, expressions, manifestations, and items. The study’s findings show that by assembling bibliographic records into interrelated clusters and displaying these according to the FRBR entity-relationship model, a new navigational capability in networked digital libraries can be developed.