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.
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