Salvete!

I'd suggest reading a paper by Martha Yee wrote for IFLA posted at http://slc.bc.ca/yee.pdf entitled PRINCIPLES FOR THE DISPLAY OF CATALOGER CREATED METADATA. I think how a system displays the MARC record is critical. As a cataloger I am shocked at the mess so many catalogs make of displaying our work to the public.

That was about contemporary to when I was in Library school. I'm not sure if I read it as part of Cataloguing and Classification or whether I stumbled across it on my own, I think it was the former. I agree with your mess observation. The OPAC to me is a different bird than the Cataloguing tools that the Librarian works with, even though they are two sides of the same record. One of the things that I think this project beat others on was the introduction of the 856u into the search results. It doesn't seem when I think back on it like anyone else was doing this at that point, but it was natural to our lads. Cheers, Brooke