I would like to suggest that no library should take OCLC up on any of these services unless they get OCLC to agree that any data involved is under an open or free license.
If you make your item and holdings data available via this OCLC hosted system, I submit to you that they will claim you cannot share that holdings information beyond OCLC because it would damage the "collective". Whoever wants to work with them on this should make it a condition that OCLC totally abandon its record use restrictions before they participate. And people should NOT be allowing OCLC access to information they are responsible for securing, like details of their patrons, and details of their financial transactions without assurance that OCLC has not right to use that data. Is OCLC going to claim ownership of this new data in order to "preserve the collective"? Will they be out there selling recommender services based on our circ data? Will they sell info about what we purchase to book and eresource vendors? They need to abandon claims to be able to restrict use of data in any of their systems if they want to offer this type of ILS service. And it would NOT b!
e good to have to deal with OCLC as a monopoly. People need to pull out their bills for what they are paying OCLC and compare it to what they pay for ILS, Link Resolvers, other services. OCLC charges are too high. Let them become a monopoly and they will get higher.
Note there are no plans mentioned for serials control or checkin. Many libraries may no longer need that, but some large libraries probably will continue to require some form of serials control module.
There was a podcast Marshall Breeding was on with a Google developer who suggested the libraries should agree upon a standard way to expose their data and put it out there so Google AND any other search engine could crawl the data. I suggest the real thing that libraries need to sit down and agree on is how to express the holdings data, which has always been a problem. If libraries just put out these files, Google and others could crawl them and link back to the libraries in various creative ways. This MIGHT mean a Find it in a Library based solely on OCLC Worldcat would not be needed for some services. Tough. We should not limit overall progress because our main aim in life is to preserve the cooperative OCLC. That's not my main aim in life, nor is it my library's.
Somebody asked what Fred would do. I suggest he'd do open source. If OCLC wants to offer ILS type modules they should do it in an open source, open system, open data mode, or they shouldn't do it at all.
Frances McNamara
University of Chicago
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Tim Spalding
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 2:41 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] OCLC annoucement
My response is at:
http://www.librarything.com/thingology/labels/worldcat%20local.php
It was posted over a year ago. Everyone could see that controlling the
data was only the first step to controlling the whole stack. Koyle's
"switching function" argument-that OCLC needed to control the data
centrally and prohibit other uses to prevent commercial
exploitation-now becomes "in order to exploit it ourselves."
I see upsides and downsides:
1. This is terrible for my business, LibraryThing for Libraries, an
add-on for catalogs. I don't see Worldcat allowing libraries to add
LibraryThing code to Worldcat, do you? Allowing us access to the data
in order to provide it? If there's going to be innovation, it'll be on
OCLC's terms.
2. It's great for the OCLC Policy debate. Before now, the idea of OCLC
leveraging a data monopoly into a priviledged position in the library
software world was paranoid speculation. Well, here it is.
Tim
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Frances Dean McNamara
<fdmcnama_at_uchicago.edu> wrote:
> Right. So sign up for that and then they can claim to own your holdings information as well as any bib information.
>
> And it's "free" if you subscribe. Right. OCLC is overpriced.
>
> Frances McNamara
> University of Chicago
Received on Fri Apr 24 2009 - 09:52:26 EDT