• http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001021.html

OCLC's Lorcan Dempsey, by way of his blog, provides us with a  useful set of ruminations about how to think about the future of the library catalog, and a framework for asking that question in a broader context. Along the way, he also places a number of other library services (Interlibrary Loan, Federated Search) into that framework, providing useful ways to think about all of the evolutions implicated in the suprisingly rapid transition to a more fully networked information system.  On the catalog, he writes:

"The discovery experience does not have to be tied to the inventory management system. In some ways we have end-to-end integrated library systems where the ends are in the wrong places. At one end, the discovery exerience is embedded in a catalog interface. And, as we now realize, it is often a somewhat flat experience with low gravitational pull when compared to some other discovery environments. At the other end, the 'fulfilment' options open out onto only a part of the universe of materials which is available to the user: the local catalogued collection. And there is a growing gap between the cataloged collection and the available collection." 

Compared with Google and MySpace, what other systems on our campuses provide 'a somewhat flat experience with low gravitational pull'? Perhaps this is related to the rising backlash against laptops in classrooms? As the library catalog, once the alpha and omega for discovery,  must evolve to learn how to fit into the larger world of discoverable information, so too our other information systems (course management, portfolio, university website) must evolve to define their niches in the larger information space of which they are only a node in an increasingly sophisticted competitive network.