Adding more material to the online catalog is more important than adding more information to existing records. That's the simplest statement of one problem, but it's at most a very slight exaggeration.
Some people apparently think so.
Perhaps that's because my degree is in rhetoric, but even cellular physicists might be a tad uncomfortable with the idea that nothing published prior to 1981 is worth reading. If we're not willing to off the old books, then we must grant them the respect they're due, which means inclusion in the online catalog. Once that's completed, and once we're sure that new materials will get into the online catalog promptly, then we can and should spend more time enhancing certain categories of records. That's responsible librarianship. The Public-Access Computer Systems Review is an electronic journal.