The article is a researcher's eye view of the value of the library catalog not only as a database to be searched for surrogates of objects of study, but as a corpus of text that can be analyzed in its own right, or incorporated within the researcher's own research database. Barriers are identified in the ways in which catalog data can be output and the technical skills researchers currently need to download, ingest, and manipulate data. Research tools and datasets created by, or in collaboration with, the library community are identified
