On Jun 7, 2006, at 9:35 AM, Conal Tuohy wrote:

> As well as their MARC records, each library of the future will
> collect a growing variety of metadata about their holdings, lending
> histories, reviews contributed by users, clusters harvested from
> usage patterns, or from full-text transcriptions, etc, etc, all of
> which they will want to make use of in conjunction with other
> catalogue data.

Hear, hear!

I assert that the "catalog" is not really a "catalog" (inventory
list) at all, but more like a finding aid -- a tool used to identify,
acquire, and use information pertinent to the information needs and
expectations of a libraries primary clientele. This tool includes
stuff from a traditional catalog, but it also includes stuff not
necessarily owned by libraries, such as pointers to licensed
materials (increasingly journal articles), the full-text of
electronic books, pre-print archives, selected materials from OAI
repositories, etc.

--
Eric Morgan

I'm hiring a Senior Programmer Analyst.
See http://dewey.library.nd.edu/morgan/programmer/.