A couple of add ons.
Karen Coyle wrote: " 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). "
The guidelines are at: http://www.oclc.org/us/en/worldcat/catalog/guidelines/default.htm Not quite all, but close to that. Of course, individual contracts could vary. And the term for the web page is "Guidelines", so ...? And of course, enforcement is always an issue.
Jonathan Rochkind wrote: "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 ..."
To add to the reasons: leadership. For example, the mentality that the changes (enhancements, corrections) aren't important, not locally, not at all. We've got a somewhat confused discussion in the profession these days. Many call for acceptance of whatever data can be purchased while others are talking about a continuous, or at least a somewhat long term and sporadic, enhancement process to the data. I support the latter, which is the only way the first is reasonably functional. But many in administrative roles (for the most part in that arena, but not solely) call for the acceptance approach to lousy data.
Then there's the question of for whom am I employed? Our local ILS is easy to use and edit, but our consortial catalog is WorldCat-based. I can make 100 changes in our catalog in a short amount of time (and do so routinely, some automated, but many not) and then ... ? Should I make the changes in WorldCat? (I certainly should for our patrons who use the consortial catalog.) But if I do, who owns those changes? The record use policy just appropriated them (seems to be trying to do so for the record as it has now been modified within the local catalog as well), but I'm a state employee, not an OCLC employee. WorldCat is meant to (in my view) serve our needs, not the other way around. So should I be doing duplicate work, when the duplicate effort is both cumbersome and becomes the restricted property of an agency that is not my employer? [Somewhat of a parallel to scholarly publishing here, but on a more routine level.] Is it even within the state ethics guidelines, my enhancin!
g a database for others while working for state? This isn't a trivial matter (the state ethics part) and the double workload is considerable as well. I don't have an answer and am not looking for one just yet. I just point it out as an additional problem that has been added to the workload possibility for more than 30 academic libraries in our consortium, the Orbis Cascade Alliance.
Back to the subject header - - SkyRiver makes no appropriation of bibliographic data, or any other data (holdings, for example, as Kyle pointed out). Might be the wave of the future.
Daniel
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Daniel CannCasciato
Head of Cataloging
Central Washington University Library
400 E. University Way
Ellensburg, WA 98926-7548
dcc_at_cwu.edu
Received on Sat Aug 07 2010 - 12:25:17 EDT