Very VERY occasionally I read a paper that is so well written, and which addressed the points so accurately and so eloquently, that I rejoice.  The paper by Pettifer et al . entitled Ceci n’est pas un hamburger: modelling and representing the scholarly article that appeared in Learned Publishing last October [1], is one of this special handful.

One of the most important need for a publisher is to categorising each bibliographic entity it produces by adding free-text keywords and/or specific terms structured according to recognised classification systems and/or thesauri specific for certain academic disciplines. Academics have the same need when annotating bibliographic references.

FRBR, the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records [1] is a general model, proposed by the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA), for describing bibliographic documents. It works for both physical and digital resources and has proved to be very flexible and powerful. One of the most important aspect of FRBR is the fact that it is not associated with a particular metadata schema or implementation.