This study results from the knowledge of the insufficiency in standards and rules
used for the identification and description of written musical documents. Enlightened by
the new standard development, particularly the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic
Records (FRBR) and recent studies on the concept of a work and bibliographic
relationships, it must achieve an equilibrium between the music cataloguing rules normally
used on libraries, much generalist, and the rules usually used by musicologists for the
description of the same documents, particularly RISM rules, much specific an inaccessible
to a less specialized public. Some proposals are made in order to contribute to the current
revision of FRBR, ISBD(PM) and UNIMARC format for music. The final result is
expectable to be a description model according to the practice and the spirit to the library
cataloguing, but detailed enough to result in a useful tool to musicians and musicologists.
The model was tested in a sample of bibliographic records from the opera Lauriane,
composed by Augusto Machado.