>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