Extending the IFLA Library Reference Model for a Brazilian popular music digital library

Brazil is recognized as a musical country, with a diverse collection of musical resources served by many digital repositories and music libraries. Historically, those systems are supported by cataloging schemes that are insufficient because they follow standards more focused on the catalog record than on the structure of cataloged works. On the other hand, it is perceived the popularization of multi-entity bibliographic conceptual models, such as IFLA LRM, which seem to be an interesting solution because they (i) have a better capacity to represent the internal architecture of musical objects; (ii) support the creation of cataloging codes and international standards that enable interoperability between collections; and (iii) can be adapted through extension mechanisms. The purpose of this paper is to present an experiment of extending the IFLA LRM in the context of a Brazilian popular music digital library application in order to identify its power of expressivity for attending this specific domain. Instead of making direct use of the entities, attributes and relationships of IFLA LRM, the adopted method was to map concepts of a specific conceptual model (adherent to the digital library in question) that represents aspects of Brazilian popular music on IFLA LRM elements. The resulting extended model demonstrated to be aligned with users’ information needs and proved the efficiency of IFLA LRM to adapt to specific domains. In addition, the strategy of extending IFLA LRM from a specific model seemed appropriate for dealing with its level of generality.