Hi
My patrons would love to find ONE record that describes "The Starr Report" or "9/11 Commission Report" and includes a list of all the instances of that work, regardless of format (or publisher). Similarly, if I had one "work" record to display for Code of Federal Regulations that somehow had my print, fiche and electronic holdings attached to it, swell.
Koha 1.2.3 facilitated doing this if you wanted to - you would have a more restricted "biblio" record which contained only the information that (from the public POV :-) identified this work - title, author, subjects, abstract. You then got a group (basically format) record which was the stuff that could change, without it being fundamentally a different "work" eg publisher, isbn, format/itemtype, class etc. Then you got the item record which has the info specific to a particular item. I think FRBR might be a bit more "general" than this - in that version of Koha the items were all the same work, but in different formats - I think that FRBR might be wanting to group together items which are not "the same" even in my loose definition of the same :-)
I don't know what FRBR-type displays will require -- it seems like separate records per format -- but workflow issues aside, eventually getting all the instances of a work grouped into one display (regardless of how man records underlie the display) would be my ideal OPAC. As far as I know, our ILS (III) won't do this, at least not yet. If Aleph handles FRBR-ized display, cool.
Well as HLT have this already (with their koha) - I'd direct you to a display to see, but I think their site is temporarily indisposed as they upgrade their interent connection - I suspect one of the challenges we will face is how to "get back" that functionality in koha 2.2 Cheers Rachel