Friends, Some of you might be interested in reading the following report -- "The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools" < http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf > Prepared for the Library of Congress By Karen Calhoun Cornell University Library "Today, a large and growing number of students and scholars routinely bypass library catalogs in favor of other discovery tools, and the catalog represents a shrinking proportion of the universe of scholarly information. The catalog is in decline, its processes and structures are unsustainable, and change needs to be swift. At the same time, books and serials are not dead, and they are not yet digital. Notwithstanding widespread expansion of digitization projects, ubiquitous e-journals, and a market that seems poised to move to e-books, the role of catalog records in discovery and retrieval of the world's library collections seems likely to continue for at least a couple of decades and probably longer". - Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools --Sukhdev Singh, NIC. http://openmed.nic.in