There was a fair amount of discussion at the recent Computers in Libraries of "next generation discovery tools" -- the technologies that, many of us hope, will supplant the now aging OPAC concept and provide better, more interactive, and more extensive access to our library's holdings.

Marshall Breeding has posted a guide to who is using these new interfaces at http://www.librarytechnology.org/discovery.pl, part of his extensive Library Technology Guides site. (I blogged about Marshall's two presentations at CIL here and here.)

These next-generation tools, whether commercial from the usually suspect ILS vendors or open source from various places, hold great promise for improving our user's ability to browse and find items that we libraries have already acquired.