FRBR is one of an increasing number of recent proposals and standards for electronic handling of library records
— other significant ones being the Metadata Encoding and
Transcription Standard (METS) and the Metadata Object
Description Standard (MODS). Each of these standards addresses different, though related, problems in library indexation. As demonstrated in, METS is used in Greenstone’s
advanced DL indexation architecture. FRBR plays a different role — providing a catalogue of works, each work being
potentially (and almost certainly) being found in a number
of discrete and different digital documents and encodings.
Even were all digital documents encoded in one standard
such as METS, there would still be a need and a benefit to
providing the interconnections provided by FRBR.