William E. Moen, a professor at the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge, gave the Eppes Lecture at Florida State University College of Information on March 20, 2007. The lecture is interesting and thought-provoking. It took much of what I see going on now, both inside and outside the library field, and condensed into some sort of whole.

He starts with an overview of library technical thinking starting in 1991 and moves through the online catalog, the Web, and up to the present. With that as a background, he discusses what our users (or potential users) want from us and what we provide them. He moves a little into some research he is currently doing regarding the use of fields and sub-fields in the MARC record — very interesting stuff!

He ends with a look at some innovative ways to use the information we’ve been creating over the years (Endeca andAquaBrowser) and leaves us with ideas for the future:

• the library as network centric, not building centric
• the library catalog as one metadata resource that needs to interoperate and play well with other resources
• the library cataloger as one who can use, manipulate and organize multiple types of resources with different metadata schemes

Both a webcast of the presentation and the slides are available for download.