Old wine, new bottle? : principles and methods for a true innovation in LIS perspectives : the view of Marshall Breeding, Mauro Guerrini, David Weinberger, Paul Gabriele Weston, Maja Žumer

This issue covers the topics of the ‘catalog’ as having a central role, the need for ‘open source’ catalogs and catalogers with new skills creating ontologies and dictionaries. A central role of a catalog is certainly true as the institution’s tool to know what it has and where its resources are located so its users (in the largest sense of the word) can know what exists and how to get to it (find, identify, select, obtain... – user tasks of FRBR). Is an ‘open source’ catalog as far as we can see into the future? Isn’t this an opportunity to explore better tools for users – what would be the ultimate device to connect users to all the information they need? – not just the limits of Google search engine resources, but the wealth of resources in collections and institutions willing to share their resources. Definition of the concept and the term “Document”. RDA, Resouce Description and Access, pays great attention to the quality of the ‘data’ and relationships between entities, rather than emphasizing the record. RDA’s focus on both description and access gives a great deal of attention to the accurate identification and description of the single entity, but also enables the cataloger to put that entity in the context of the rest of the bibliographic universe through the relationships and access points.