Deborah Tomaras wrote: > I would be curious to see links to evidence-based papers from rigorous > research studies that prove that patrons want FRBR/WEMI in searching, > retrieval, etc. I've found nothing on the IFLA website, where I would have > thought they would reside. All papers there > (http://www.ifla.org/en/node/881) seem to lack any reference to user > studies. I've not seen them elsewhere, either. So please provide links to > the "lot of research" that's out there--thanks!
OCLC has a research home page at http://www.oclc.org/research/ and you can type "frbr" in the search box to find what they have done with FRBR. Also, to begin looking for research on FRBR you can type the words "frbr" and "research" into the search box of your favorite search engine and get a good start there. For instance, one article discussing two FRBR case studies can be found at http://alia.org.au/publishing/alj/54.1/full.text/ayres.html . There is an article called "User research and testing of FRBR prototype systems" by Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba in Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v. 44, issue 1. I'm not a researcher, what I found through those two simple searches (the citations I gave are only a tiny sampling of what I found) show that stuff *is* out there. More elaborate searching, not to mention following citations in the articles, will unearth much more. How rigorous any particular study is, I can't say. But research on both user search in general and FRBR in particular has been done and is being done. (BTW, please don't get hung up on whether "patrons want FRBR/WEMI in searching". Patrons don't think (and won't think and don't have to think) in FRBR terminology. FRBR is only the conceptual model for the metadata, designed for use by information technologists. The group 1 entities (WEMI) are only the labels used by information technologists to describe parts of the FRBR model. Users don't care, and furthermore have no need to know, what labels we use for the entities and the relationships, as long as the pieces of metadata all relate together in a way that successfully leads them to the information they're seeking.) Kevin M. Randall Principal Serials Cataloger Bibliographic Services Dept. Northwestern University Library 1970 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208-2300 email: k...@northwestern.edu phone: (847) 491-2939 fax: (847) 491-4345
