Taking the ship out of the bottle

I have always marvelled at the beauty of a model ship that is built in a bottle. Because my father collected ship models I was able to watch a retired Danish sea captain painstakingly construct some parts outside the bottle and assemble it all within. I marvel, too, at the online public access catalogues that librarians and automation managers and cataloguers have constructed over the years at great effort and great expense. In a sense, these are similar to the ships in bottles; the OPACs are finely crafted but present only a small window to the information within our libraries. Access is still some‐what limited. Almost all of us still have to view the electronic library through glass teletypes (or perhaps VT‐100 emulation), and it is a rather narrow view.