T he promise of online catalogs has never been realized. For more than a decade, the profession either turned a blind eye to problems with the catalog or accepted that it is powerless to fix them. Online catalogs were, once upon a time, "the most widely-available retrieval system and the first that many people encounter."1 Needless to say, that is no longer the case. Libraries cannot force users into those "closed," "rigid," and "intricate" online catalogs. 2As a result, the catalog has become for many students a call-number lookup system, with resource discovery happening elsewhere. Yet, while the catalog is only one of many discovery tools, covering a proportionately narrower spectrum of information resources than a decade ago, it is still a core library service and the only tool for accessing and using library book collections.In recognition of the severity of the catalog problem, particularly in the area of keyword searching, and seeing that Integrated Library System (ILS) vendors were not addressing it, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries elected to replace its keyword search engine with software developed for major commercial Web sites. The software, Endeca's Information Access Platform (IAP), offers state-of-the-art retrieval technologies. Early online catalogsLarson and Large and Beheshti summarize an extensive body of literature on online public access catalogs (OPACs) and related information-retrieval topics through 1997.3 The literature has tapered off since then; however, as promising innovations failed to be realized in commercial systems, mainstream OPAC technology stabilized, and the library community's collective attention was turned to the Web.First generation online catalogs (1960s and 1970s) provided the same access points as the card catalog, dropping the user into a pre-coordinate index. 4 The first online catalogs, byproducts of automating circulation functions, were "intended to bring a generation of library users familiar with card catalogs into the online world." 5 The expectation was that most users were interested in known-item searching. 6With the second generation of online catalogs came keyword or post-coordinate (Boolean) searching. While systems based on Boolean algebra represented an advance over those that preceded them, Boolean is still a retrieval technique designed for trained and experienced searchers. (Twenty years ago, Salton wrote, "[T]he conventional Boolean retrieval methodology is not well adapted to the information retrieval task." 7 ) Boolean systems were, however, simple to implement and economical in their storage and processing requirements, important at that time. 8Soon after the euphoria of combining free-text terms across records wore off, the library community recognized that the major problem with first-and second-generation catalogs was the difficulty of searching by subject. The "next-generation" catalog By the early 1980s, thinking turned to next-generation catalog features.10 Out of this surge of interest in improving online catalogs emer...

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Although academic libraries are increasingly converting stacks into collaborative spaces and physical books and journals are being replaced by their electronic counterparts, the concept of browsing as a means of discovery is seeing a resurgence in the world of search and discovery. While many users start their online research with electronic databases and library catalogues, interviews with North Carolina State University Libraries patrons provide evidence that physically browsing the shelves to find similar materials is still common. A growing awareness of the need to preserve this type of serendipitous discovery as a complement to keyword searching is inspiring the development of online virtual browsing tools that replace and enhance physical access to library stacks.