On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 7:16 AM, Karen Coyle <lists_at_kcoyle.net> wrote:
> 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.
I don't think that was Tim's point, I think he's referring to OCLC's
traditional market, and , if I'm not mistaken, giving hints to why
OCLC is pursuing the record licensing debacle as we are reaching a
point where the hardware/storage issue is something they *can't*
charge for. If we can go and spend 10000$ on a complete small
distributed scalable pluggable network for storage that will deal with
ALL your data (and then some; both in terms of performance,
scalability and flexibility) amount for 10 years without problem, the
traditional view of what services OCLC delivers are null and void.
The infra-structure is dead cheap. Librarians do most of the
cataloging. We all know how to match / merge. We know how to deal with
MARC. More and more librarians understand this now, so this is about
what we are paying OCLC for which we cannot do ourselves, no?
I don't think the idea of collaborating cataloging is bad per se, but
it shouldn't (and possibly can't, in the long run) be this expensive.
I also sniff problems in the margins, like FRBR / RDA efforts and
global identity management that perhaps have solutions outside of the
library space, and these challenges needs to be sorted before any MARC
data set becomes particularly relevant to perhaps what is needed these
days.
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Fri Aug 06 2010 - 18:30:49 EDT