Tim Spalding wrote:
>> But there's an important distinction. When I bring this up to catalogers,
>> they often say "Well, those records CAN'T have an OCLC number on them,
>> becuase they are NOT OCLC records, it would be a LIE."
>>
>
> Particularly a lie as having an OCLC number is one of the criteria by
> which the OCLC Policy FAQs determine whether a record is "OCLC's" or
> not. (FAQs, Attribution of WorldCat #6)
>
Well, OCLC is just plain wrong there, if they're suggesting that. There
is nothing to stop me from manually adding an OCLC number to any record
I want. The Lexis page number case suggests to me that I almost
certainly have a legal right to do so in the US without OCLC's
permission. (An OCLC number, which is just an incremental number applied
in order to records as they are added to OCLC is _very_ much analagous
to a page number, isn't it?).
And doing that doesn't mean that the record came from OCLC, and would
give them no legal authority over the record whatsoever (even assuming
they have legal authority over records that actually DO come from OCLC).
It's actually in OCLC's _interest_ to get these OCLC numbers all over,
even in records that are NOT WorldCat records. Because the more places
the OCLC number is, the more things online can link to and integrate
with worldcat.org, and the easier it is for libraries to do the WorldCat
Local thing. It actually seems to me to be in OCLC's immediate term
intersets to get the OCLC number as many places as possible. It's ALSO
in we the library communities interest, because we have a serious
shortage of useful identifiers, and the OCLC number is one of them, and
the more places it is the better.
It's a case where the business interests of OCLC (as I see it) are
actually _quite_ congruent with the community's interest. Kind of ironic
if OCLC is nonetheless doing things to discourage this from happening,
like suggesting that as soon as you put an OCLC number on something,
that means OCLC owns it!
Jonathan
> You know what I want to do? I want to make a competitor with WorldCat
> Local. It's a great model—a cloud-based OPAC/ILS. I think I could do
> it better than OCLC could, and I think people would pay for that.
> Maybe they wouldn't, but I'd sure like to try and show I can.
>
> Alas, to make that I'd need to assemble the data. And that would be
> against the OCLC policy and any library attempting to buy my service
> would lose all their OCLC-derived records. So, what was supposed to be
> OCLC's benevolent "curation" of community content is now the lynch pin
> of a software monopoly.
>
> On the plus side, I think this wakes the behemoths, the OPAC vendors,
> who should get together to sue OCLC over their non-profit status and
> as a monopoly. I hate the notion of LT as a "vendor," but sign me up
> for that.
>
> Tim
>
>
Received on Thu Apr 23 2009 - 18:06:37 EDT