Digital Library Federation Forum, April 12, 2006
Unbundling the ILS: Deploying an e-commerce catalog search solution
nAny search other than known item
nKnown item searching
nAnything other than books and journals
nLogical groupings of results (e.g. FRBR)
nFaceted browsing
nRelevance ranking
nSideways searching (suggestions, expansion of searches and search targets)
n
What ILS Catalogs Don’t do Well…
(liberally stolen from Roy Tennant)
How did we get into this mess?
Gernerally speaking, automation started in the backroom with acquisitions and cataloging.  Circulation was a stand-alone system tied to barcodes (another backoffice system for inventory), and Cutter’s rule of the catalog was well-satisfied by the card catalog
As I explain to every new programmer who comes to work in the library, even the MARC record was only invented for backoffice use, namely the transfer of records to someone who could then print you some cards.
I am hard pressed to call what we created with the Endeca software anything other than a 2nd generation online catalog, since I do not believe that we have moved forward from the first generation catalogs that are basically online card catalogs with poor keyword searching and insufficient authority searching thrown on top of them.