Comments on: OCLC’s policy: Train, stop, cried the constable on the rails

By: Big Brother is Facebook (?) « Closed Stacks

Big Brother is Facebook (?) « Closed Stacks — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:18:47 +0000

[...] they thought was for use by that community, not for profit by the company who owned the community. Free Range Librarian has a very good post breaking down the reasons why OCLC’s claim struck so hard withint the [...]

By: Free Range Librarian › Special Commemorative Library Link Set

Free Range Librarian › Special Commemorative Library Link Set — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:02:59 +0000

[...] could be roughly translated as “you create it, you pay for it, we own it”). See my previous post on the [...]

By: K.G. Schneider

K.G. Schneider — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:39:30 +0000

Richard, I missed your comment earlier and found it today while updating my post. I wonder about WorldCat Local (and I do have a dog in that fight, so note that too). It was all guns-a-blazin’ until it moved from theory to implementation. Hmmm…

By: Hearing Voices | Metadata Matters

Hearing Voices | Metadata Matters — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:21:05 +0000

[...] Karen Schneider pointed out on Free Range Librarian, my last column, entitled “Getting There”), includes some concerns I have about how OCLC’s [...]

By: Richard Huffine

Richard Huffine — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:46:03 +0000

Karen – Thanks, as always, for bringing your skills as a writer and your insights as a world-class librarian to this issue…

But don’t you think that OCLC might actually have a grander plan behind this move? I have for some time thought that OCLC was preparing to challenge the ILS world with a Worldcat Local that included a circulation module.

Might they be planning to introduce services that rival and compete with the systems we are all using to manage these shared records? Wouldn’t one think that Open Source is a key threat to such a plan in their minds?

It all boils down to the critical question of why we have catalogs now and in the future… if it is to share, then OCLC’s current model will work… but if sharing comes through new discovery tools, OCLC may see a real threat from catalog records harvested from others and unassociated with the resource sharing capabilities of OCLC.

By: Amy Ranger

Amy Ranger — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:56:33 +0000

Thanks for the thoughtful post, and the link to Diane’s article, which was a pleasure to read and digest after wading through the angry messages on AUTOCAT. It feels as though everything is lining up for a “perfect storm” in library-land: changes in technology, rules, and how we’ll pay for it all may come to a head in 2009.

I’m sure that OCLC just wants to keep the milk flowing from the cash cow of bibliographic services; a lot of people make nice salaries in Dublin, Ohio. But you know what they say about freedom — it’s just a word for nothing left to lose.

By: K.G. Schneider

K.G. Schneider — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:01:09 +0000

Rob, good clarification. I realized after I wrote the post that I had packed a lot of issues and assumptions in the phrase, “many cost models have morphed from data ownership to data service.” That’s a whole book, if not a PhD.

By: Rob Styles

Rob Styles — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:29:32 +0000

Karen,

Great post, but the yoghurt analogy misses one of the most key points – records ain’t yoghurt.

We allow distributors of yoghurt to “release the dogs” on thieves becuase yoghurt is a rival good. That means if I take it then you are left without it. Records are a digital, and therefore non-rival good. Everyone can have a copy and OCLC would still have them. They don’t get “used up”!

Like you say, though, they don’t understand the business they’re in, or at least not the one their members need them to be in.

rob

By: K.G. Schneider

K.G. Schneider — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:47:02 +0000

Jessamyn, exactly. What gets me the most is they have pulled in some of the best and the brightest from LibraryLand, and as Frank Rich recently observed in the NYT (writing about the Kennedy administration), that’s no protection from bad decisions.

By: Jessamyn

Jessamyn — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 15:13:31 +0000

The thing that has surprised me most about this is how little it seemed that OCLC was expecting the push-back on this move. While it’s certainly their right to shore up their policy, in this age of openness and sharing — with OCLC being one of the big cheerleaders — it seems obvious to me that this move would have some downsides and detractors and not just people like LibraryThing whose business model depends on access to shared records. Their responses have looked more like back-pedalling than confident assured replies. Considering their status as a “membership organization” they’re not being very clear on who in the membership benefits from this.