The USGIN Catalog and Data Services website (http://catalog.usgin.org) hosts several geospatial metadata catalog (CSW) and geospatial data services (WMS, WFS, WCS) implementations and clients. Although the site functions as a showcase of USGIN service implementations, the Catalog Service for the Web service (CSW - http://catalog.usgin.org/geonetwork/srv/en/csw) is a primary metadata node for the U.S. Geospatial Information Network.
To expand on the article, USGIN is contributing to the CatalogConnector in hopes of making the software more user friendly and efficient. As such, USGIN has already contributed code to improve front end user capabilities and optimizations to improve http response speed. If you have any requests or suggestions in regard to the CatalogConnector, please drop us a line.