let library machines talk to machines, so that library humans can better serve patrons

Or in other words: "Free the Humans" (available as stylish tshirt).

I think it may be difficult coming from a non-CS background to conceptualize how fundamentally important it is to make library data machine-readable, to enable easy interoperability and extendability.

That's why I loved this posting in ALA Techsource, which explains it all much better than I could:

Out of the Secret Garden: The RDA/DC Initiative