Re: Spiderable OPACs and the elephant in the library lobby

I heard of guy (its not me - <grin>), who wrote a screen scraper using
Procomm to capture screens, and then a suite of GW Basic programs to
re-format screen captures of labeled displays for re-use.  That was 20
years ago, using DOS of all things and dial-up access to catalogs of
interest.

If there's a question of legal exposure, that's been an issue for quite
a while now....

Mark Andrews, Creighton University

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 1:51 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Spiderable OPACs and the elephant in the library
lobby

Andrews, Mark J. wrote:
> While we're on this topic, has the issue of record ownership been
> definitively resolved?  If (for conversation's sake) I wanted to make
my
> catalog the basis of a union catalog for a city, county, state,
region,
> nationally, internationally, is there any reason why I can't do that?

Mark,

It all depends on the contract you have with the source of your records.
OCLC's contract language is on its site, and is pretty liberal. I
believe it allows for all except commercial use. As I recall, the
vendors providing tables of contents have contract language that says
that you can't share the ToC fields outside of your library system.

The real question is: has anyone ever been hassled about re-using
records? I haven't heard of a case... has anyone else? And it's not like
we aren't sharing them because records are flying around all over the
place with metasearch and Z39.50 and all that.

Also, I know that there are libraries that get at least some of their
cataloging copy by screen-scraping off of other catalogs. OCLC makes it
a point not to show a very full bibliographic record on WorldCat,
undoubtedly to discourage free-riding on their bibliographic database,
but you can get a true MARC-formatted record from LC and a
screen-formatted record from just about any database in this country.
When I was working at UCal on their systems we once got a note from
someone in a monastery library in Italy who had cataloged the library
using the LC and MELVYL OPACs.

So I think we're beyond the point where anyone could say: that's MY
record. But we should also be looking hard at our contracts, because
that's where we're vulnerable.

kc

> If my neighbor down the street wants to contribute their records to
this
> effort, can they do that?  If the records of one or more libraries
> include those created locally, that came from a book jobber, from LC
or
> another national union catalog, or from OCLC (all mixed together), and
I
> choose to use these records to offer some service that competes with
> OCLC, can I do that and still remain an OCLC customer?  Even if its
> legal, are there ethical or moral issues here?  Do the answers to
these
> questions vary by jurisdiction?  For example, when I was in library
> school many moons ago, I heard a war story that the University of
> Missouri System's lobbyist in Washington, DC made a patent application
> for a week's changes to their union catalog, as well as the catalog as
a
> whole - weekly at the Patent Office.  The idea those records belonged
to
> the taxpayers of Missouri, regardless of where they records originally
> came from or how they were produced, and no matter what OCLC had to
say
> about the matter.  OCLC, for its part (so the war story went) did the
> same darn thing, to protect their claim that the OCLC Union Catalog
was
> a "unique bibliographic entity that exists as a unique work (and
asset)
> in its own right."
>
> Just curious about whether any of this is still an issue.
>
> Mark Andrews, Creighton University