Just a quick note to direct your attention to AustLit, a project I ran across in a post by Jim Weinheimer. You have to be a subscriber to access the full database but some examples can be explored here.
I was curious to know what the underlying structure was and what strategy of collocation they use for the FRBR views and found these two pages:
Data models and technology.
It turns out that AustLit draws on the topic maps “topic” and “association” constructs to model the relationships in FRBR. It’s interesting to actually see this in action.
While I am skeptical about the representation of ontologies and human semantics in computer systems, topic maps concepts seem to lend themselves very well to expressing bibliographic relations and collating bibliographic information.
The FRBR display is a choice librarians make in the hope of helping users navigate the bibliographic and resource universe – one example for more “elegant” ways of organization.
all things cataloged 
Hi Saskia,
AustLit is developed by my former colleague at the National Library of Australia, Kent Fitch, who got wind of Topic Maps quite some time ago, and create a data model that uses bits of Topic Maps in it. Here’s a presentation he made years ago; http://www.austlit.edu.au:7777/presentations/ausweb02/koolaid/presentation.html
Thanks, Alex, in fact I already had the paper http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw02/papers/refereed/fitch2/paper.html on my “reading list” but so far haven’t gotten round to it and consequently failed to make the link to AustLit…