Andrew Pace's article in American Libraries, My Kingdom for an OPAC, discusses how the structure of the OPAC is hindering libraries. He places the blame both on librarians and vendors and MARC record and AACR2.

It is in interesting read and it makes you kind of realize why Google and the internet have been making so much headway into our territory (information). They (Google and other internet companies) have programmers who are not librarians and who have not been constrained by the over dependence of MARC (which Pace points out predated online catalogs). These programmers look beyond the keyword searching and the authority control that seem to entrench librarians.

If anything this article seem to illustrate how we as librarians have been very myopic at times regarding our hold on information and its organization. Just because we have been doing it for centuries, doesn't mean that others can have better ideas and do some things better. You see it on the library listservs, when Google comes out with something new (Scholar, Books, etc.) everybody clamors about how they (Google) needs to get librarians involved. The impression is that we (librarians) do it better. Maybe we don't. But then again maybe they don't either. Maybe by combing our collective wisdom we can see areas that others have missed. Unfortunately I don't see that happening. They (Google and the internet companies) are more concerned with the competition and the dollar. We (librarians) are locked into grousing about our value.