To be clear, my understanding of the DLF task force's charge is somewhat more limited than you imply here. They are specifically focused on standard methods to decouple end-user-facing 'discovery' interfaces from 'the rest'. This is complicated enough already, and is what most of us want with most priority right now, so I think it was a wise focus. But it's still just a subset of the overall work to create standard methods for all the various components (and what is the list of those components even?)--and as you say, even this much we are not guaranteed it will go anywhere off the drawing table.

Point taken, although my examples are already clearly applications that exist now: "an application to manage our collection and circulate it" (a standard ILS), "another to manage linking" (a link resolver system), and "a search interface that integrates access to a wide array resources" (new discovery tools like Primo from ExLibris). So yes, I think my first sentence is likely misleading given both the work of the DLF Task Force and what will likely occur in reality.

You said, "But to enable this to happen effectively we will need standard methods for these components to communicate." We already have this: the MARC format. If you don't like MARC, how about MARC XML? Or MODS? Note also that there is a growing number of librarians pushing open-source solutions (rather than the vendor-based ones you describe). They foresee an idyllic community of librarians and others creating and sharing open-source tools that will fulfill all the technological needs of libraries.

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