On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 4:12 PM, Michele Newberry <fclmin_at_ufl.edu> wrote:
> Never has been reducing costs outright. Google "OCLC rate of rise" and you
> find publications from the earliest days quoting Fred Kilgour on this. It
> was always about controlling the rate of the cost increases predicted for
> technical services (since public use was not yet envisioned in the early
> '70s).
The is the part that, I think, many in the library world don't fully
appreciate. OCLC's core services are computer information-processing
services. They are about databases, servers and code. In the rest of
that industry, the cost-for-value curve isn't flat, or rising slowly,
it's an ever-plunging line. You get more, or it gets cheaper. The
cause is simple. Computing power, storage and bandwidth get cheaper
every year. Computing power, storage/cost, bandwidth/cost and so forth
have been doubling every 2-4 years or so for decades.
Storing and serving WorldCat's MARC records used to be the job of a
room of computers with spin-y tape drives. Now a much larger WorldCat
fits on a cellphone—a cheap cellphone!
And as for serving data, while OCLC's "Web Scale" services needs a
redundancy LibraryThing doesn't have, it's worth noting that
LibraryThing appears to serve more data than they do. And while we
don't search and store as much data, we're getting up there—40 million
distinct MARC records, at last count. We do everything off a
half-dozen commodity Dell boxes.
There are arguments for why OCLC must have better, more expensive
stuff. And yes, programmers aren't getting cheaper. But OCLC's prices
ought to show some relation to the underlying costs of information
technology, and they just don't. Year over year you get roughly the
same information services, and you pay more. That doesn't make sense.
I think that if librarians were more familiar with information
processing they'd demand lower prices or better service every time
they renew with OCLC. Of course, people who buy computers, databases
and bandwidth don't need to mobilize, be educated or demand things to
get what they deserve. Competition insures they get it.
Tim
Received on Fri Aug 06 2010 - 13:15:14 EDT