reaction to Karen Markey's current D-Lib piece on OPACs

Over lunch, I began reading Karen Markey's "The Online Library Catalog: Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained" in the January/February D-Lib Magazine. My thoughts:

• Markey quotes Karen Calhoun's report, which emphasizes the importance of working to "organize, digitize, expose unique special collections." The first person whom I can recall articulating this concept was Donald Waters in a fall 2005 digital preservation conference:
  

  If large quantities of published materials are available online through some common interface, it will be increasingly hard to distinguish libraries based on their holdings of these materials. Instead, libraries and their institutions will increasingly be distinguished by the special collections of rare and unique materials that they hold and by the scholarly services they provide for these materials, especially in conjunction with similar collections at museums and archives locally and around the world.
  

  (source: ARL 244. Couldn't find it thru the public web; ARL is reorganizing its web site and I kept encountering, somewhat ironically, HTTP 404 messages in trying to access this document.)
  
  I've come to recognize this need and the multidisciplinary nature of library/archival projects as a result of my work with the Northwest Digital Archives.
  
  
• In describing the decline of the Online Public Catalog, Markey also cites two ILS vendor-related issues: the failure of library coordination in addressing RFP processes and the feailure of ILS vendors to respond to changes in search technology and, in response, enhance their ILS products. I recall discussing both issues at length during a code4lib 2006 conference session, particularly the need for ILS vendors to provide open APIs to support local development.
  

Markey argues that "before mass digitization projects make significant headway, the library community must act on building the future online catalog...." She then describes some characteristics of next generation OPACs, such as the relevance feedback support built into NCSU's Endeca-supported catalog. Notably, software vendors are not included in the core group that the author envisions as building the next generation system. Perhaps the key is moving (as NCSU did) beyond traditional ILS vendors in building its online catalog. As I noted in an earlier post, that move meant that NCSU gave up traditional user group support for its online system in exchange for the ability to deploy more robust catalog services. It's a more difficult trade-off than it sounds.