I dunno. I think there's been some progress. Three years ago projects
and products like VUFind, Blacklight, Aquabrowser, Endeca-based
cagtalogs, the Talis Platform and Google Books were either not in
existence, not as good or not as popular as they are now. John Blyberg
and David Pattern were just warming up. There were open Z39.50s but
Simon Spero hadn't crawled the LC Authorities*, Open Library hadn't
challenged OCLC--and LibraryThing had just a few thousand members, no
competitors and neither free data or products for libraries.
So, I think there's been progress--solid progress. The catalog of the
future will be modular, open source, usable, social, fully "on" the
web and reliant on open data. We've had progress on all fronts and, as
long as OCLC doesn't win, I expect more progress. Things only seem
bleak when compared with the change of the larger web and information
landscape itself--which has been, I think, much more impressive.
Tim
*Still my favorite righteous hack.
Received on Fri Mar 06 2009 - 16:56:14 EST