Karen Coyle wrote:
> Rob, the presenters at the meeting primarily talked about the licensing
> restrictions on vendor-supplied records. Apparently many vendors who
> supply records do not allow them to be shared.
This is one of the questions that seems unanswered with WorldCat Local.
We have a lot of these records in our current catalog. Going forward,
we could (like LC now says they'll do) insist that purchased vendor
records be shareable, but here's the conundrum: selector wants the
electronic resource that contains 30,000 titles. Vendor provides MARC
records (or an Excel dump or whatever) but refuses to allow us to share.
While there are many things that will truly hold up a license
agreement and we absolutely refuse to sign, my selector still wants this
resource and doesn't so much care how we go about providing access to it
and so isn't going to hold up a license agreement for a desired resource
just because we can't get associated metadata. If we refuse to sign,
we'll just end up having to catalog those titles ourselves. And it's
impossible to catalog those titles ourselves. So, we sign an agreement
that prohibits record sharing.
Here's another conundrum we run into: we have a large electronic set
that has a print (or video) equivalent for which there are OCLC records.
We could download all those records & programmatically (we do this
frequently) turn them into [electronic resource] records. We can upload
those [electronic resource] records back to OCLC and consider our use of
the original records as valid because we are contributing back to the
community. But, what if I want to give someone else those records
(outside of OCLC)? I used OCLC records as my source, can I redistribute
the 30,000 records that I derived from them? There was also discussion
at the FoBC about libraries that can't afford to belong to OCLC. They
are already far behind and now we're leaving them farther behind.
Erin Stalberg
Head, Cataloging Services
Chair, Metadata Steering Group
University of Virginia Library
stalberg_at_virginia.edu
(434) 982.2854
Received on Thu Jul 12 2007 - 12:40:43 EDT