Check out the September 1st issue of Library Journal (p. 30-32) for a discussion of XC in the article, “Baker’s Smudges” by Stanley Wilder, Associate Dean at the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries!
Our vision and plan for XC continues to evolve. What started as a vision for getting around the limitations of our local ILS now looks like a way to bring the potential of “Library 2.0″ to any library through open source applications - and makes the vision very exciting - and might I say “extensible?”.
Stanley’s vision is to bring back that “user recommendation” data from the smudges on catalog cards - we now have the potential to do that in a much more elegant way (see John Blyberg’s sidebar on p. 32 of the above article, and the related posting).
One of my visions is to bring back the hierarchical groupings found in old book catalogs, based upon the FRBR data model (check out the FRBR blog at http://www.frbr.org).
Nancy Foster, the Lead Anthropologist on our project, has a vision to bring work practice study to the design of XC - check out her blog postings.
We’d like to hear your visions for what XC should do. What direction would you take it if you implemented it at your institution?