James Weinheimer wrote:
>
> There is a big part of me that agrees with Nathan: that this is *our* stuff
> that we shouldn't just be giving away. After all, it was made with the
> blood, sweat and tears of generations of experienced catalogers and is
> incredibly valuable. Simply giving it away seems crazy.
>
Haven't we ALWAYS simply given it away? Have cataloging departments
contributed shared cataloging to the universe because they expected
their institutions to be financially renumerated? The paltry 'credit'
sums you get from OCLC is not why we share our cataloging cooperatively,
in OCLC or other places, is it?
We share our cataloging cooperatively because we recognize that the sum
of all of our work is a public good, which serves all of our interests
to share.
So now, unlike 50 years ago, there are a lot of people other than
libraries interested in metadata. Many of them even produce tools that
our users use. What's the difference between sharing with other
libraries back when libraries were the only ones interested in
bibliographic metadata, and sharing with non-library entities now
interested in bibliographic metadata?
It's not that some of them are for-profit. We've always been happy to
share our metadata with, for instance, corporate libraries in for-profit
institutions too. Haven't we?
Jonathan
Received on Mon Sep 14 2009 - 13:35:18 EDT