>The catalog is going to be with us in one form or another. One thing that >never ceases to amaze me is how the library field is sooo quick to throw >overboard useful tools just for the sake of something different. The ILS >in its present form has LOTS of room for improvement but it doesn't mean we >have to hide it behind other labels or have to turn it into some nebulous >concept that doesn't mean anything. One might not necessarily mean throwing out the other. If you go to Chapters here in Canada (like Barnes & Noble in the States), you will see a web interface that is a totally separate system from the inventory application that manages the collection, and round-trips between them for the status of an item (and you occasionally see staff looking at the green screens for the inventory functions). I think a next generation opac is more likely to be something that exists in multiple forms, and has some smart strategies for synchronization and maximizing what each system does best. I would like to see an instance of the catalogue maintained as a lucene index for mixing and matching with other lucene indexes for example (think "find me everything in X that I have rights to because of Y" or "everything in X that is not in Y"), another version that could be consumed by desktop indexers, yet another for handing out on a USB drive as a portable app (you could probably do this with lucene now or any other indexing system with decent compression), and so on. Most of all, I want a version that does some sort of type-ahead in a search box on the top of every web page without venturing into a separate interface at all, and one that can inject itself into arbitrary web spaces where desired content is identified in order to sort out rights management issues. But I am not sure that the equivalent of a green screen for inventory control isn't going to be running somewhere behind all of this, I just hope our patrons never have to know it's there. art