The catalog's last stand

This article describes the uncertain future of the online catalog, and the tension that exists between creating a cataloging code that meets user needs while adhering to principles deemed important by the cataloging community. Underscoring this tension are the provocative questions posited by the Taiga Steering Committee, which call into question the future of libraries. For the traditional cataloging community, full and detailed descriptive cataloging is still the gold standard. They believe fervently that this level of description is essential to the continuation of scholarship, and resist most challenges to this view of their role and mission, even as Google seduces their users. 1 It's a confusing time to be a cataloger. On my desk is a three-ring binder consisting of a couple hundred draft pages of RDA 2 , the successor to AACR2. Alongside it, in stark contrast, rests a single duplexed page of " provocative questions " from the Taiga Forum 3 , a meeting of associate university librarians for technical services first held in May 2006. RDA represents the future of cataloging, yet the Taiga publication questions whether in five years catalog librarians will even exist. I'm not alone in my confusion. In March 2007, the Library of Congress held a meeting to discuss the future of bibliographic control, a future that is becoming increasingly more difficult to discern. A colleague asked recently whether I thought purchase of an enriched online catalog (opac) tool was justified. Rejuvenating the catalog to be a more user-friendly and powerful tool, I told him, is not just warranted, but responsible. Despite this assertiveness, I have doubts concerning the long-term future of the opac and its role in resource discovery. I maintain the position that libraries, as finances allow, ought to provide the best catalog search experience possible. Yet OCLC's recently-announced experiment to serve as the local catalog for a handful of libraries, beginning with the University of Washington in April 2007, gives me pause (see