Automatic Conversion from MARC to FRBR

Catalogs have for centuries been the main tool that enabled users to search for items in a library by author, title, or subject. A catalog can be interpreted as a set of bibliographic records, where each record acts as a surrogate for a publication. Every record describes a specific publication and contains the data that is used to create the indexes of search systems and the information that is presented to the user. Bibliographic records are often captured and exchanged by the use of the MARC format. Although there are numerous ”dialects” of the MARC format in use, they are usually crafted on the same basis and are interoperable with each other —to a certain extent. The data model of a MARC-based catalog, however, is ”[...] extremely non-normalized with excessive replication of data” [1]. For instance, a literary work that exists in numerous editions and translations is likely to yield a large result set because each edition or translation is represented by an individual record, that is unrelated to other records that describe the same work.