This year the ALCTS Forum at ALA Midwinter brought together three perspectives on massaging bibliographic data of various sorts in ways that use MARC, but where MARC is not the end goal. What do you get when you swirl MARC, ONIX, and various other formats of metadata in a big pot? Three projects: ONIX Enrichment at OCLC, the Open Library Project, and Google Book Search metadata.
What of a service existed where the patrons selected an item they needed out of our library catalog and that item was delivered to the patron even when the library did not yet own the item? Would that be useful? With the growth of online bookstores, our users do have the expectation of finding something they need on the web, clicking a few buttons and having it delivered. When such expectations of what is possible exist, where is the first place a patron would go to find recently published items — the online bookstore or their local library catalog? Does your gut tell you it is the online bookstore? Would it be desirable if the patron’s instinct were to be the local library catalog?
