“If the catalogue were freely downloadable, people could load it and the maps onto their device of choice and use that to locate books.”

We may see that in the future, but at the moment, I think we can’t assume that the average library user is that tech-savvy or (since libraries often cater to poor people) arriving armed with handheld computers.

Your post makes me feel nostalgic, though, because I remember back in the days when the hot thing in library science was microfiche catalogs. There was that same sense of, “Look! We can do things better than in the past!”

Why not have kiosks with multiple indexing schemes and simple digital maps to the book’s location?

If the catalogue were freely downloadable, people could load it and the maps onto their device of choice and use that to locate books. HTML works fine on my phone, and I have made maps of whole cities for it. I cannot see how a map of a library would be difficult.