The National Library of Australia has innovated with federations/aggregations such as Picture Australia. Now we have Music Australia, a very nice service which provides access to Australian music resources of various types. A strong feature about the service is that it makes data work – it is possible to traverse the data in various helpful ways. This is a welcome step above most library catalog applications.
There is a page of presentations by the developers of the service where the background can be traced.
Music Australia makes use of FRBR principles:
The MusicAustralia resource repository is most like PictureAustralia in its functionality and potential size. Unlike PictureAustralia, however, and like Australia Dancing, MusicAustralia will present resource descriptions for physical format and online resources. MusicAustralia aims to enhance resource metadata, primarily by exposing relationships between music items, including the entity relationships described in IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records12 (FRBR) information model, and other ‘horizontal’ relationships between music items. [MusicAustralia: Building on National Infrastructure]
