> 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).
Which, incidentally, the not-so-secret secret is that very few OCLC member libraires currently do this. At least I don't think so. Almost all OCLC member libraries are also getting records from third party vendors (not a majority of their records, but non-trivial amounts, and possibly a majority of "electronic" records in many cases, which are becoming an increasingly large portion of "all" records). And many many of those third-party records are not contributed to OCLC because of licensing restrictions and/or cost to get them into worldcat.
The membership agreement might say that, but it's not being done.
Our cooperative cataloging is terribly broken in several ways. The massive amounts of cataloging that do not make it into OCLC for several reasons, some of which Karen covered in another post, as well as the difficulty of getting "changes and improvements" made after you downloaded a record from the cooperative cataloging environment (ie, OCLC, the effective monopoly). Having a monopoly certainly doesn't seem to be getting us what we need. I wouldn't mind trying having some competition to see how that does.
Jonathan
Received on Sat Aug 07 2010 - 11:41:41 EDT