Going back to Web 1.0, or worse?

Two things catch my attention today, both of which have come up at work in the last week or so. First, this announcement from EBSCO:

Effective with a software release due this week, EBSCO will treat a short list of command line search tags (when entered in lower or mixed case) as text. Only UPPER CASE instances of these tags will be treated as search tags.... We highly recommend that all users become accustomed to entering ALL command line search tags in UPPER CASE to accomodate future additions to the short list of affected tags....

So, what can we do to incovenience power users? If you want to do an author search, you need to enter AU, not au. Descriptors (subject terms) are only DE, and not lowercase de. Let's go back to the good old days of case-sensitivity. Let's change something people are used to using, for no clear reason to the customer. As my director said, "Let's re-learn DOS while we're at it."

Then, a colleague noticed that a lot of the locations in our library catalog (which are somewhat cryptic abbreviations) no longer have links to what the location codes mean. Since it's a consortial catalog, there's often no way for a user to know what library has the book they need. I'm told there are over a thousand location codes in our catalog, and that individual libraries are responsible for maintaining their own information. Since some of them aren't doing it, it's the patrons that lose. And who knows why those libraries aren't doing it; maybe they don't have the staff time, or the system makes it too hard to keep up. But once again, our users get the short stick.

In the meantime, we've put on our a website a list of the main tags, and which libraries they represent. We'll try to see if something can be done at the consortial level. I don't know what we can do about EBSCO - may get the patrons after them?