I think the question that OCLC and others have been asking themselves
lately is:
Could someone else replicate OCLC's services sufficiently to compete
with OCLC in a "threatening" way?
To answer that, we'd need a lot more information; information that
OCLC presumably has, and that was the motivation for the record use
policy. But one clear thing is that in order to replicate the
services, you would need to have a database of library holdings that
is close to the data in WorldCat.
So then we need to ask: what is the content of WorldCat? One
particular fact which puzzles me is found in the data in the annual
report:
"Total participation in the OCLC cooperative at June 30, 2009
involved 72,035 institutions in 171 countries, an increase
of 2,195 institutions from the previous year."
"11,810 OCLC Governing
Member Libraries*
Governing Members (reflected in the
chart at right) contributed all of their
current cataloging online or supplied
current cataloging information to
OCLC by computer tape or file."
What I don't know is if the over 60,000 libraries that are NOT
governing members are covered by the record use policy. Actually, I
don't understand this difference between participant and member
libraries, and what it means. Membership *requires* you to contribute
all of your cataloging to OCLC (which, BTW, MSU was trying to do, and
OCLC stopped them from doing it by asking a much higher price for
their input). What does participation require? Can participant
libraries share their records with others openly? In what services to
members do these participant libraries' records benefit the members?
And vice-versa?
The upshot is that it appears that a majority of WorldCat *may* have
been contributed by participants but not members, and if not a
majority than some large chunk. So the statement that WorldCat is a
member benefit/privilege that must be protected by keeping member
records from potential competitors probably needs some further analysis.
I'm not saying this is some kind of monumental revelation -- it may
not mean much of anything, but it's another example of what we (or
maybe just I) don't know about the make-up of the services that are
absolutely essential for the survival of a huge chunk of the libraries
in our immediate environment.
kc
Quoting Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_JHU.EDU>:
> Running (eg) $5 million of servers has a bunch of other costs
> associated with it: physical plant, power, bandwidth, additional
> hardware for failover, staff, etc. I am not in the business of
> running server farms, I couldn't tell you what multiple of $5
> million gets you the total cost.
>
> But I get your point, and think you are probably right, that
> _machine_ costs are not the majority of OCLC's expenditures, even
> including associated costs as above. The majority of OCLC's
> expenditures (and we could probably look at a public report
> somewhere instead of guessing) are probably staff, same as most
> organizations, I'd guess same as LibraryThing.
>
> You pick a particularly unimpressive list of activities for those
> staff costs (aren't almost all of those people, the lawyers and
> salesmen and tech support people on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the
> Galaxy "first ship" that society tricks into going out into
> oblivion?), but other activities include cataloging and metadata
> creation, metadata normalization (both manual and automated, which
> takes staff time to write), other software development (not just
> worldcat, but the other OCLC software, including software to
> facillitate ILL, one of OCLC's core services, also that metadata
> normalization software, software to exchange metadata in both
> directions with third parties libraries and not (and the staff to
> negotiate, facilitate, and maintain those relationships); the
> various APIs they're turning out; R&D, etc), and probably many other
> productive tasks even I don't know about.
>
> They do provide all sorts of useful stuff. They also charge all
> sorts of lots of money to lots of libraries. There is also a lot of
> things I wish they'd innovate faster on, and some at OCLC are
> certainly trying, but that takes staff resources too, although I
> also think it takes a willingness to break with the past even if it
> pisses off your customers that I'm not sure OCLC has (and it would
> be a risk to try doing that, hoping you do it RIGHT enough to not
> piss off your customers in the end).
>
> Is what OCLC provides a good value? I really don't know, there is no
> obvious answer to me. Heck, I don't even know what different
> libraries pay for OCLC, but even on a collective aggregate level the
> answer of whether it's a good value is still not obvious to me. Is
> a count of how many records are in worldcat a good way to decide if
> it's a good value? No, agreed with Tim. Should OCLC be trying to
> convince us it is a good value with real info and not propaganda,
> marketting, threats, guilt, or tugs on heartstrings? Yes. Have they
> convinced most of the folks I know? No, although most of us are not
> convinced of the opposite either, we're skeptical but not
> committed. Are the bulk of decision-makers who decide whether to
> send OCLC money convinced? I have no idea. Has OCLC better convince
> them, and possibly change their costs/services such to make it
> obviously convincing, if they want to survive? Indeed. Do they
> legitimately want to survive by providing an obviously good value!
> , instead of by ensuring monopoly lock-in? I sure hope so, but I'm
> scared that some OCLC decision-makers may not.
>
> Jonathan
> ________________________________________
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Tim Spalding
> [tim_at_LIBRARYTHING.COM]
> Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 11:42 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] OCLC response to SkyRiver lawsuit
>
> "How many disk reads does it take to catalog an average record? How
> quickly do new records get indexed?" Etc.
>
> I don't want to be argumentative, but, simply put, it doesn't matter
> anymore. Ingesting, storing and searching tiny text files has become a
> trivial task. I'm not saying it's free, but for an organization of
> OCLC's scale, it's trivial.
>
> Again, take LibraryThing. We consider ourselves overtaxed parsing MARC
> records from the 200+ libraries who regularly upload full dumps. What
> does being taxed mean? It means that a virtual server, taking up about
> 1/3 of a $15,000 box, sometimes gets behind. Boo-hoo for us!
>
> You can assume any multiple you like and the numbers don't work. Let's
> imagine, for example, that OCLC needs to do 10,000 times as much
> processing as LibraryThing does. (This would imply regular dumps from
> 2 million member libraries!) Do the math out and you'd need about $5
> million dollars worth of servers. Amortize that over a few years, and
> it's a percent or two of the OCLC budget. This is an organization that
> gains and loses far more from swings in its stock portfolio.
>
> The simple fact is that sending, receiving and processing tiny text
> files has become a trivial task. It's been a trivial task for years.
> And every year the costs sink still further.
>
> There's no question non-IT tasks, like customer hand-holding,
> report-writing, marketing, sales, lawyers, consultants and executives,
> still cost money, but to defend OCLC's prices by citing how many
> records they store, or how much processing they do, is to be out of
> touch with what computers are like today. That argument is dead.
>
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Sat Aug 07 2010 - 10:39:55 EDT