Where next for the back room? - what does the future hold for librarians in Technical Services?

Where next for the back room? Not decline but expansion, for whilst in-house cataloguing will necessarily continue if libraries are to maintain accurate bibliographic metadata necessary for their resources to be easily searchable and accessible, as books and printed serials increasingly go online new opportunities are appearing for cataloguers. Great potential exists for co-operative ventures between libraries and information services departments as they manage, create and maintain high quality metadata for digital resources produced or selected by their institution and act as community information and knowledge managers.