“The Catalog’s Last Stand”

Norm Medeiros, Associate Librarian at Haverford College pens a piece [PDF Link] that lays down some provocative questions about the future of local catalogs and discovery tools. Given the power of the ever-growing mega-databases of library metadata (OCLC) and data (Google), is it a matter of time before the usefulness and depth of those tools and resources make irrelevant smaller tools and catalogs? In their place Medeiros notes the growing importance of workflow management and institutional repositories as new frontiers for the library.