Especially as we drift towards the exit assignment on good catalogues, assign #7, you do need to cement the understanding on the history of library/information retrieval systems.  What drives the UI in terms of index technology, staff roles for workflow and total return on investment in catalogue data, usually by genre/collection.

This is a perfect graphic to add to the discussion of the ILS. Timelines are nice click on the pic to see the original post from @mbreeding .

Follow the link to the full graphic