Quoting Tim Spalding <tim_at_librarything.com>:
> I suspect that much of it is behind the wall, but how much could that
> really be? Leaving aside ILL, how much traffic goes back and forth?
>
> Let's take the 241 million number. Lets multiply that by five to cover
> re-loads and accessing of the data in other way. That's 2.4 billion
> records moving. MARC records average about 1k. (I just ran a large
> consortium and the average was 927 bytes, so I can be way off and
> still right.)
>
> That's 1,149 GB of data. That fits on a decent PC, without
> compression.
Tim, you of all people know very well that it's not just a matter of
moving bits along wires (or with tubes or trucks, depending on your
world view) and plopping them down into disk space. It's about the
SERVICES, and what we don't know anything about is how OCLC manages
its services. How many disk reads does it take to catalog an average
record? How quickly do new records get indexed? What is the record
de-dup process like? How many of the libraries inputting records into
OCLC are not using MARC? How many are using a proprietary system? (I
worked on a system with 40 input sources, all using "standard" MARC,
and it was a management nightmare that took 3 FTE just to interface
with the libraries.) What does an ILL transaction look like? (I've
seen some of the guts of those and they are pretty ugly.)
I'm not defending OCLC. But I don't think we can count bytes and
declare that we can replace WorldCat and all of its services on a
decent PC. What I want to know is how the cost of WorldCat (done the
way OCLC does it) compares to the income, and then it would be
interesting to have the same figures for some comparable services,
like III's ILL (SkyRiver cataloging is too new to be a valid
comparison). (And, no, I don't consider LT to be a comparable service.
I think LT is great, but it's not operating in OCLC's space.) I'm
really done with the speculation and would like to get/see some data
that we can actually work with.
Rick Mason has an interesting blog post where he brainstorms on the
possibility of breaking up OCLC into two organizations: OCLC.org and
OCLC.com. I find it to be an interesting idea, and more information
about revenue and expenditures would make this a particularly
intriguing conversation.
http://www.libology.com/blog/2010/08/02/one-possible-oclc-solution.html
kc
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Fri Aug 06 2010 - 17:21:52 EDT