EDitoRiaL  |  tRuitt   3

Marc TruittEditorial

marc truitt (marc.truitt@ualberta.ca) is Associate Director, 
Bibliographic and Information Technology Services, University 
of Alberta Libraries, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and Editor of 
ITAL.

The catalog. Love it? Hate it? Depending upon who is speaking, it may be cast as the ultimate portal that enables user access to all local and networked 
resources, or it may be a tool of Byzantine complexity, 
comprehensible at best to but a small fraction of librarians 
able to navigate its bibliographic metadata encoded in an 
arcane 1960s-era format. It is a rich trove of structured and 
controlled information assembled over decades by the 
work of countless dedicated catalogers and others. Or, it 
is the now-obsolete product of a labor-intensive process 
of description and subject analysis that has no relevance 
in a Web-centric world where “everything” is findable via 
the Google search-box. Its attempt to organize knowledge 
provides catalogers with a raison d’etre, but sends their 
colleagues and many users fleeing for simpler and more 
all-encompassing tools. It is our alpha and omega, our yin 
and our yang.

Few topics in librarianship—perhaps with the con-
spicuous exception of that perennial library school favor-
ite, our profession’s status as a profession—seem to 
provoke the range and depth of sentiment engendered 
by discussions of the place of the catalog. Especially in 
recent years, criticism of the catalog has grown ever more 
strident, to the point where it has become commonplace 
in our profession’s literature to say that this most basic 
of library services “sucks.” As a consequence, librarians 
have increasingly fallen into one of two camps, with those 
critical of the catalog often simplistically characterized as 
favoring, and those defending it as opposing “change.”

A number of initiatives have emerged in response 
to this ferment. Some of these have focused on our bib-
liographic metadata, and particularly on its ability to 
express the relationships and interconnectedness of the 
bibliographic universe. As we have traditionally cataloged 
whatever we had “in-hand,” our cataloging codes and 
encoding standards have done a very good job of manag-
ing the description of bibliographic items; what they have 
not generally expressed well are the relationships among 
items. FRBR and FRAD—the Functional Requirements for 
Bibliographic Records and the Functional Requirements 
for Authority Data—seem promising beginnings for 
addressing the relationship issues, although there are 
as-yet very few practical implementations. Resource 
Description and Access (RDA), the forthcoming successor 
to AACR2, is designed around FRBR concepts; it will be 
interesting to see how this plays out in the “real world;” 
equally interesting will be to what degree the present (or a 
modified) MARC21 is able to express RDA’s FRBR-based 
relationship model.

Other approaches have focused on developing systems 
that are able to exploit our existing investment in biblio-
graphic metadata in new and useful ways. The pioneering 
and best-known example of this, of course, is the discov-
ery tool developed by a partnership of North Carolina 
State University Libraries and Endeca, which premiered 

in early 2006. This initiative included several innova-
tive features not previously found in library catalogs, 
such as search result relevance ranking and the ability to 
perform faceted searching against a variety of controlled-
vocabulary indices (subject/topical, form/genre, date, 
etc.) NCSU’s Endeca discovery tool spawned an entirely 
new product segment for the catalog: major ILS vendors 
have scrambled to develop their own next-gen products, 
combining relevancy and facets with additional function-
ality such as Web 2.0 social and collaborative tools and 
enhanced federated searching capabilities. The result of 
all this activity has been the first cross-platform growth 
opportunity for ILS vendors since the development of 
resource-linking tools and the ERM.

We at ITAL have watched these trends with keen 
interest and have published works describing many of 
the major developments vis-a-vis the catalog in recent 
years. Indeed, since late 2004, ITAL has published at least 
eleven major papers on various topics related to improv-
ing the catalog. With our publication of Jennifer Bowen’s 
report on the first phase outcomes of the University of 
Rochester’s eXtensible catalog (XC) project in this issue of 
ITAL, we continue our commitment to publish important 
research in this area. The Rochester project is noteworthy, 
both for its modular and metadata-focused approach and 
for its high visibility as an open source effort that has 
received significant support from the Andrew W. Mellon 
Foundation. I predict that this paper will quickly take its 
place among the other ground-breaking works on the 
catalog that ITAL has published, and I’ll eagerly be await-
ing the next progress report on the XC.

n “Must-reads” Dept. 
Okay, so I may not be the first out of the gate with this 
one, but for those of you who haven’t looked at it yet, 
trust me, you’ll want to. Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future 
of the Internet and How to Stop It  (Yale University Press, 
2008), which divides the Internet into “generative” tech-
nologies such as the PC, and proprietary appliances such 
as the iPhone, may or may not resonate with you, but 
I think it could well become the next big debate about 
where the Net is and where it should be going. Grab a 
copy and read it today.