A couple of years ago, discovery tools landed on the scene promising technological and pedagogical advances beyond federated search’s wildest dreams. Libraries naturally thought the evolution…

Comparison of OPAC 2.0 interfaces conducted in the fall of 2008.

The following guest post is from John Wilkin who is Executive Director of the HathiTrust, a Librarian at the University of Michigan and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Dat…

This week I sat in on the first of the three "Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future" webinars being hosted by ALA.  This one was hosted by Karen Coyle with the title New Models of Metadata where she talked about library-specific efforts such asRDA and FRBR as well as the linked data effort in the wider world of information.  There was a great deal of concern expressed in the chat window by participants about the future of cataloging, of cataloguers, and of MARC.  The latter brought up memories of Roy Tennant's "MARC Must Die" declaration.  My take away, though, isn't that MARC is dead as much as MARC is a dead end.

[This is part one of a three-part series.  When you’re done here, read on to part 2 and part 3.] My job is the subfield of programming that relates to searching, retrieval and metadata, espec…