Thinking about the future of the library catalog, the following has been bugging me for a long time. I’ve finally written something about it that is at least semi-articulate, I hope, and perhaps a statement that I can use as a basis for my sabbatical project.

Selection of resources relevant to a particular user community has long been a function of libraries, especially academic libraries. In this day of information overload, the selection function is more valuable and more challenging than ever before. In the past, factors such as acquisitions budgets and limited availability of physical items greatly restricted the amount of content that a single library could collect. Today, with the proliferation of electronic content, these restrictions have been greatly reduced. Libraries can choose to “collect” materials relevant to their user community even if they don’t actually acquire and/or store copies of the information objects. They accomplish this by placing resource surrogates where users can find them. In a sense, the catalog itself becomes the collection.

This has great potential value, but it requires librarians to approach selection somewhat differently than they have in the past, and it places significant new demands on library systems. The current generation of library cataloging and collection management systems place emphasis upon acquiring and providing inventory control for physical materials. To build a coherent collection that contains both locally and remotely stored and managed information objects, librarians need systems that provide more robust support for the selection and organization of diverse content.

For example, we need:

• Applications that allow selectors to quickly obtain or generate metadata describing individual resources and/or targeted collections of resources and add this metadata to one or more local resource discovery and/or management databases, adding minor customizations useful to the local community as needed. Having the option of downloading a copy of the full resource would also be desirable. What I have in mind is something similar to what iTunes and similar music file management applications currently support.
• Applications that enable people (librarians and users) to recognize and articulate relationships between resources that are relevant to their own needs or the needs of others. Ideally these would include functions that collect and/or analyze data related to resource usage, statistical analysis of full-text, etc.
• Applications that support development of frameworks or schemas for organizing resources and controlled vocabularies for describing or categorizing resources.
• Applications that are designed to interoperate and/or exchange data.

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