Many of the papers make recommendations. It is interesting to read these articles and see which of their solutions were followed and which have gone in unexpected directions. For example, Mary Micco’s two papers, written in 1995, discuss subject authority control on the Internet. They call for authors of Web documents to provide subject classification numbers and for expert systems to use those numbers to create subject maps of the Internet. As it turned out, getting authors to supply classification has been problematic and search engines like Google have become the preferred method for information retrieval on the Web. On the other hand, Edward Gaynor’s paper debating the usefulness of Standard General Markup Language (SGML) versus the MARC format written in 1996 raises many of the same points later made by Roy Tennant in his call for the end of the MARC format and a switch to catalogs using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) in 2002.1

Some of the papers contain information that is still relatively current and provide good introductions to their topics. Karen Calhoun and Bill Kara do an excellent job of presenting the two ways to catalog electronic journals and articles in aggregator packages (single versus multiple records), and Beth Guay discusses ways to use the MARC linking fields to make either approach more comprehensible to the user. Sharon Farb’s paper on universal design illustrates the problems faced by users with disabilities. Martha Yee provides a summary of the International Federation of Library Association and Institution’s (IFLA’s) guidelines for OPAC displays. Both papers have recommendations that would make our online catalogs much more user-friendly, yet are not widely discussed today. Larry Dixson presents two papers on how Z39.50 actually works, and William Moen explains why it does not work as well as it should because of interoperability problems. Barbara Tillet’s paper is an excellent primer on the problems of name authority control in an international environment. Colleen Hyslop has two articles describing the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) and the reasons behind its creation.

If the book has a flaw, it is the fact that the papers only go through 2001. No mention is made of why the CFFC decided to end the series. It is interesting to note that none of the papers discuss Google even though it debuted in 1998. The members of the CFFC did not foresee today’s furious debate about the need for online catalogs and cataloging when users prefer to search Google to find information. Yee’s paper on online catalog displays makes a passing mention of IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), which also came out in 1998. Again this is a topic of keen interest to catalogers in the new millennium. To a cataloger in 2006, the absence of these topics makes the collection of papers seem incomplete and dated, even though much of the information is still current today. The collection’s main value is that of historical source.