Karen,
What's your prediction about what's next?
Is this effort basically toast or not? Will real consensus will be
hard to create, and will events move fast enough that what you and a
few others perceive about alternatives will be obvious to everyone by
the time anything is done? Or is this a strategic retreat and, with
some clever handling OCLC's power grab can be recast as a community
enterprise?
Tim
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 11:29 PM, Karen Coyle<lists_at_kcoyle.net> wrote:
> B.G. Sloan wrote:
>>
>> "According to OCLC's announcement, 'a new group will soon be assembled to
>> begin work to draft a new policy with more input and participation from OCLC
>> membership. Until then, the 'Guidelines for the Use and Transfer of
>> OCLC-Derived Records' will continue to govern WorldCat data exchange, as it
>> has since 1987."
>>
>> http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6668022.html
>>
>>
>
> I recommend that folks take a look at the committee's report, which is at:
> http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/FinalReport_ReviewBoard.pdf
>
> In particular look at some of the technical assumptions in that report (and
> presumably in the thinking of the committee). One in particular, on page 1,
> is the strong affirmation that the answer (question unclear here) is an
> international union catalog. And that union catalog is WorldCat. If you
> begin with *that* assumption about the technology, you don't then explore
> other models, such as distributed data systems or data "in the web." This is
> unfortunate, in my mind, because it seems to reject, a priori, the NextGen
> catalog ideas that are floating around. It would have been interesting to
> use the opportunity that the OCLC policy development provides to have a
> discussion in our profession about future directions. I don't see how that
> can happen if the discussion cannot question whether a centralized union
> catalog is what we see serving libraries in the future.
>
> There also doesn't seem to be an awareness of the technical difficulty of
> controlling downstream use of data. It has always seemed to me that this is
> patently infeasible, and therefore not a good basis on which to create a
> policy. We have good examples of how this has played out in other sectors --
> including the failure of DRM with materials that are much less mutable than
> bibliographic data, such as sound files.
>
> kc
>
> --
> -----------------------------------
> Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
> ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
> fx.: 510-848-3913
> mo.: 510-435-8234
> ------------------------------------
>
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Received on Thu Jul 02 2009 - 23:46:54 EDT