Although I come from a relatively small institution without a significant research mandate, I’m still fairly shocked at the lack of discussion and awareness among rank-and-file librarians, and within library “scholarship”, regarding many of the core issues you bring up in the piece.

At a recent symposium on “Next-Generation Catalogs”, it became clear that the overwhelming majority of librarians believe that their Next-Gen system will be a product purchased from a traditional ILS vendor, the difference being that it looks and acts more like Amazon. And maybe they’re right. However, the dialog about web services, open repositories – or even real discussions about a wholesale shift from MARC for standard library collections – is still the domain of researchers and developers. The most promising library-oriented projects that I’m aware of are often emerging from outside of libraries.

As you mention at one point in this piece, the most open, accessible services are useful without metadata that people want to use, but I have yet to see a broad-based, universal discussion among librarians to that end.

Unfortunately, so many libraries don’t make room for participation in community-driven development projects, and so remain largely outside the sphere from which their future systems may be developed, and largely ignorant of the issues surrounding them. We risk continuing to be passive consumers of interfaces – a role that doesn’t argue well for librarians’ long-term relevance.