By now a lot of people have heard about 'Primo', the OPAC project that Ex Libris is working on to create a 'next-generation' OPAC. And none too soon; there are plenty of people out there doing cool things that make the Ex Libris OPAC look outdated. They are not the only one, almost every LIS vendor out there right now has an OPAC project with a spiffy name.

At CIL, I attended a presentation by Roy Tennant of California Digital Library and Andrew Pace of North Carolina State University Libraries. The NC State OPAC has gotten considerable attention, and I know it has made the rounds on the PALNI listservs. This session was great, and a couple of things stood out:

1. The term 'OPAC' is apparently anathema now. It's back to 'catalog'. And rightfully so. Most patrons don't know what an 'opac' is. It's jargon. Plus, the term 'catalog' better defines what the application is supposed to be doing in the first place. The catalog is just a tool. It's not the be-all-end-all application that will serve all of a patron's needs.

2. Most of the cool stuff being done right now, and the NC State catalog is no exception, is being done in spite of the underlying integrated library system. NC State went with a web design company that had not previously worked with libraries, and came up with a cool and innovative tool. The next revolution in library applications will be seen in the libraries that begin to innovate on their own despite the ILS instead of sitting around waiting for vendors to be innovative. There is too much web integration needed in the web 2.0 environment to do otherwise. In other words, the ILS, while still important, will become less and less the focus of the library in the future.