What's more, the information systems of the future will not be able to ignore the vast amount of knowledge stored in existing systems. For this and other reasons, author, title, and subject access will be very important for the foreseeable future. The challenge that catalogers face is how to provide access to new and existing resources in a way that makes sense to library users. No one knows how libraries will address the problem of providing access to all these materials. The catalog is currently the primary access mechanism in most libraries, but this might not always be the case.
Librarians create catalog records partly because it used to be impractical to search works directly.
Technological advances have dramatically increased storage and processing capabilities. Moreover, improvements in indexing techniques and searching algorithms have made it feasible to search certain materials directly. In other words, there are times when it makes more sense to search items than to search catalog records representing items. In short, many of the functions performed by catalogers now may be partly or totally performed by automated processes in the future. This does not mean that cataloging will no longer be necessary.