Good points. "If I wanted a drop-in in one-size solution for resource discovery, from a "corporate" supplier, for instance, I'd have to say that WorldCat local looks pretty darn interesting. But the kind of locally-iterable, modular, extensible toolkit that I think positions libraries well for experimentation and innovation."
There's another important reason this "kind of locally-iterable modular extensible toolkit" is absolutely vital, in addition to "positioning libraries well for experimentation and innovation." It's because we absolutely need to functionally integrate our various _different_ products from differnet vendors. Even if you go with WorldCat Local, you still have many products from other vendors that you'd really like it to integrate with (both on the end-user-interface, and on the backend staff metadata control and other interfaces). The path to accomplishing this is with that kind of "modular extensible toolkit"---dropping in an ostensible "one-size solution" often only creates more problems with lack of integration. We want "loosely coupled", but we're currently often stuck with "not coupled at all", which causes no end of problems. Jonathan Joe Lucia wrote: