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In his 1997 article, Richard Meyer addressed how these budgetary constraints would affect libraries.3 He identified four trends that he predicted would produce significant changes in the nature of the job of the cataloger: (1) Libraries would experience a continuing decline in the number of physical artifacts to catalog. Inflating prices colliding with declining budgets will decrease the rate of acquisition of new volumes. (2) Libraries would face increasing demands to cut costs and to outsource operations, especially cataloging. The catalog operation is one of the more obvious targets for outsourcing and will prove irresistible for administrators. (3) Libraries would see lower costs for traditional cataloging because of competition in the information marketplace. Information consumers increasingly resort to more convenient information sources such as online booksellers or online databases, rather than visiting the actual library, which puts further pressure on library budgets. (4) There would be an increasing variety of information resources to control. These are both new types of physical artifacts and digital resources, both of which require that new skills be acquired. Subsequent papers by Dorner in 1999 and 2000 elaborated these ideas. * This prediction has not come to pass. Data from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) statistical surveys show essentially flat acquisition expenditures (Figure 2). Of the numbers given, serials （期刊） and monographs （图书） each constitute about half. Note, however, that both “monographs” and “serials” include digital as well as physical items. Therefore, as the proportion of digital items increases, the number of physical artifacts declines but the number of items to catalog remains steady. It is the ability to handle the digital items outside the traditional cataloging stream that has led some to question the wisdom of current practices (e.g., Calhoun6). * In their 1997 survey, Libby and Caudle determined that only 28% of a