Doctoral candidate Jacob Jett successfully defended his dissertation, "Towards a General Conceptual Model for Bibliographic Aggregates," on August 12.
His committee included Professor Allen Renear (chair); Research Associate Professor David Dubin (director of research); Assistant Professor Karen Wickett; Affiliate Professor Timothy Cole, University Library; and Professor J. Stephen Downie.
From the abstract: Bibliographic aggregates such as anthologies, collections, journal issues, and media series are increasingly becoming the focus of bibliographic description. Bibliographic description, typically in the form of bibliographic metadata records, forms the cornerstone of information retrieval systems. Library users rely on bibliographic metadata records to find, identify, select, and obtain information resources of interest to them. In turn, library catalogers and metadata librarians rely on high-level conceptual standards to inform them regarding what metadata is central to each kind of bibliographic entity's description, including bibliographic aggregates like those mentioned above. However, not all of our high-level conceptual standards agree on how bibliographic aggregates should be modeled and what metadata is significant enough to be recorded in their bibliographic descriptions.
This dissertation analyzes conceptual models for bibliographic aggregates central to metadata descriptions for bibliographic description in library settings.More specifically, this dissertation focuses on the variations in conceptual models for bibliographic aggregates in four high-level library-centric conceptual models: DublinCoreCollections Application Profile (DC-CAP), Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), Object-Oriented FRBR, and Library Reference Model (LRM).