There is a lot of effort and some great innovation going on around library catalogs. The problem is, these great ideas are often crammed in right next to system constraints introduced into catalogs over a hundred years ago.
Catalogs are, at their heart, inventory systems, not really discovery systems. That means they work quite well when you know what you are looking for, and really fall down when your are exploring ideas and concepts. They fail completely in trying to encode “knowledge” that is the context that spans works and people.
Lists, tags, even whiz-bang visualizers have their use, but when we tie them back to an item centric bibliographic warehouse, they loose their effectiveness. Lists are interesting, but without “connective tissue” to say why these items are all on the list together, they don’t represent knowledge, simply groupings. It is more important to know the logic behind a list than just the list itself. An example:
Colossus
Father
Alfie
What is this a lost of? Turns out fictional computer names from the movies (The Forbin Project, Alien, Barbarella). Without this last little line (and for good measure a citation http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080206065106AA7uAQ3 ) the list is meaningless. Worse still if I run across this list in a year will I have any idea what the list was of?
By claiming victory in catalogs as inventory systems, freezing their development and moving on to whole new systems (that can point back to the catalogs) we can invent great new and much more useful systems.
This is not a tirade against ILS vendors, or the open source folks, it is instead a belief that if the ILS vendors and open source folks shifted their focus on innovation instead of incremental evolution great things can happen.