All this talk about OCLC got me curious about the revenues OCLC brings in from cataloging, interlibrary loan, and WorldCat. From the most recent OCLC annual report I could find:
Metadata Services (largely cataloging) - $86.6 million
Delivery Services (largely interlibrary loan) - $49.0 million
End User Services (largely WorldCat) - $25.6 million
That's $161.2 million! These three revenue sources account for almost exactly 2/3rds of OCLC's total revenues. I can see why OCLC would be a little nervous about endangering these revenue streams.
I think the need to preserve these revenue streams will be what drives the new record use policy. See the third of the three following bullet items (taken from: http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/policy/council/update/default.htm):
Why do we need a policy?
* To maintain integrity of a shared community resource which benefits the cooperative of OCLC members
* To reinforce the collective commitment to shared values, self-governance and a spirit of reciprocity and trust
* To provide the underpinning for a viable business plan to sustain WorldCat
Bernie Sloan
--- On Tue, 3/9/10, Ross Singer <rossfsinger_at_GMAIL.COM> wrote:
From: Ross Singer <rossfsinger_at_GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] OCLC and Michigan State at Impasse Over SkyRiver Cataloging, Resource Sharing Costs
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Date: Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 12:40 PM
On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan_at_nd.edu> wrote:
> I beg to differ; it is trivial to dump and expose one's bibliographic records to the Web.
>
> Any ILS worth its weight in salt has an export function.
I think you may be surprised that this is not a universal truth.
*Many* ILSes have an export function, some are premium features.
I have no idea whether or not hosted ILSes (or which hosted ILSes)
have this option (especially for free).
And I'm still not sure I see where the value lies in all libraries
exporting their data. Won't there be extremely high percentage of
overlap for all but a small minority of libraries (which is where the
really interesting data would be)?
David brings up a valid point, as well. Taking the LC records dump in
the Internet Archive as an example.
1) This is a snapshot from 2007
2) It's only book records
3) This is now out of date.
So merely exporting our records isn't enough. How do we deal with the
deltas? Does every library have to deal with the deltas?
-Ross.
Received on Tue Mar 09 2010 - 13:35:57 EST