Towards accessibility to digital cultural materials: a FRBRized approach

The purpose of this paper is to address the key components of building good digital collections.

Different categories of digital collections based on guidelines defined by the authors are presented. Issues related to public access are illustrated. A model using the FRBR entities relationships is proposed to improve the accessibility of digital cultural materials so that scholarly research can be enhanced. The number of digital collections has been increased significantly since the late 1990s, but few studies investigated how these collections were organized and managed. To attain an understanding of the current status of institutional digital collections, various collection sites were examined and analyzed. The study focused on the existence and level of richness of bibliographic descriptions provided for each image; whether a search engine was available or not; how easily the search could be performed; and how search results were organized. The presentation of search results is problematic. Applying the IFLA FRBR model to digital materials can bring a solution.

The IFLA FRBR model presents the search results hierarchically so that related materials can be easily collocated. This feature meets the end‐users needs. The attributes of work and expression entities presented in the IFLA FRBR model should be applied differently for event‐based digital cultural materials. Defining work‐ or expression‐level entities under the event or theme will be more logical than under author and/or title for cultural materials. Doing expression‐level cataloging might also work for this type of materials.

Before building a digital collection, institutions should have a well‐thought‐out and well‐planned collection management mechanism. Metadata scheme, content standards and content management system are important fundamentals. Much can be done to improve the accessibility of digital collections. The proposed FRBRized approach will make the retrieval of digital cultural objects easier.