ALA 2012: FRBR Presentation Four

“Current Research on and Use of FRBR in Libraries”
8am on Sunday, June 24, 2012
Speakers: Erik Mitchell & Carolyn McCallum, Thomas Hickey, Yin Zhang & Athena Salaba, Jennifer Bowen

Presentation 4 of 4

“FRBR and XC: Participatory Design”
Jennifer Bowen

No slides available for this presentation.

Bowen began her presentation with a brief introduction to the eXtensible Catalog (XC).

She then noted that user studies were built into the development of XC. The participatory design included observations of users working, surveys, and interviews. They asked users what they wanted.

The findings of that research were not FRBR-specific but what users wanted basically matched the FRBR model:

  • Users have preferred material and format types
  • Users want to know why items are on a result list
  • Users want to choose between versions of resource and see the relationships between resources

For ever-changing future needs, XC has a customizable user interface. Browsing of a collection of resources can be customized based on some common attribute or relationship within the collection.

Finally, Bowen concluded that their research showed that aspects of FRBR do address what users need to do.

Related links:
The results of the research are available in the book Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design and the eXtensible Catalog