Online Catalogs and Library Portals in Today's Information Environment

With the transformation of the card catalog into the online public access catalog came the expectation of its increased functionality. For the most part, today's online catalogs perform an expanded list of tasks quite effectively. Bibliographic utilities, system vendors, and individual libraries continue to improve bibliographic retrieval by providing new and better services through the catalog. In spite of these improvements, many observers believe that online catalogs have reached their maturity. Today's information environment includes a wealth of material to which online catalogs cannot provide universal and up-to-date access. Increasingly, librarians are turning to federated searching portal applications to find a means of managing the flood of digital information that threatens to engulf users. This chapter describes essential functionality of such tools, suggesting directions and strategies for improving them. The author concludes that, while the online catalog will continue to function as the principal tool for access control of the library's physical collections, the federated searching portal will ultimately serve as the library's principal Web gateway to digital resources.