I worry. I worry that the way we got in the situation we are in now is
by putting too much responsibility and control in the hands of our
vendors. I previously saw the solution as wresting this control _and
responsibility_ back from the vendors. We need to take responsibility
for _figuring out_ how our tools should work, and we need to have the
_ability_ to make what we figure out happen (or rather, to experiment in
innovation toward that direction). On the one hand, to do this we
certainly need coordination and collaboration between institutions,
becuase none of us have the resources alone. On the other hand, we need
to 'let a thousand discovery tools bloom' too, in an ecology of
innovation and experimentation, to see what works.
Giving the public catalog to OCLC is not that. With OCLC Local we have
no more power to control what our interface looks like than we ever did.
We are taking no more responsibility for figuring it out than we ever
did. Choosing OCLC as a catalog 'vendor' feels like just more of the
same---we are still just picking a vendor and letting them do all the
work with no responsibility or control from us. In this case, the vendor
just has a much better tool. For now. But it's still a kind of vendor
lock-in.
Note that OCLC Local already indexes article content----from OCLC
provided databases only. I'm not suggesting that this is OCLC's choice,
OCLC would (probably) like to index everyone elses articles too, but
everyone else may or may not be okay with that. The point is, this is
still a vendor we're dealing with. Or at any rate, an entity that has
economic interests an awful lot like a vendor, relationships with other
entities in the market (customers and competitors) an awful lot like a
vendor, and as a result acts an awful lot like a vendor.
Jonathan
William Denton wrote:
> Does anyone else suspect that the next generation catalogue has just
> arrived, and it's called WorldCat Local?
>
> Bill
> --
> William Denton, Toronto : www.miskatonic.org www.frbr.org
> www.openfrbr.org
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Wed Apr 25 2007 - 08:10:57 EDT