Quoting Daniel CannCasciato <Daniel.CannCasciato_at_CWU.EDU>:
> I guess I see it differently. Not that I admire the price assigned for
> MSU at all. I'm only saying that a policy, publicly available, isn't a
> threat. To me a threat is something outside of policy and procedure. I
> think we do agree, though, that the there's little to admire in the
> price quote for MSU. Sure, the policy for membership is that you are
> currently contributing data, not that you have done so in the past. The
> outcome of the suit will help define whether OCLC's price quite was
> legally done, or simply punitive and anti-competitive.
I suspect that a lot will hinge on whether such pricing is applied
equally to all libraries in the same situation. There are tens of
thousands of libraries that batch load their records into OCLC, and in
the 2008/9 year, 85% of the records entering OCLC were batch loaded.
In the long run, it might be more economical for OCLC to batchload
records than to have people cataloging directly on the system.
Batchloading does seem to count as a legitimate way to contribute your
records to OCLC. It appears, however, to earn OCLC less revenue, so if
a library moves from cataloging directly on OCLC to batch loading,
OCLC's revenue will go down. It looks like OCLC was trying to charge
Michigan a batch load fee that would approximate what OCLC would have
charged for direct cataloging. (Does anyone know what the per-record
cataloging fee is for copy cataloging? Or at least how the figure is
reached for charging libraries for cataloging? I know that you get
"credits" for contributing a new record.) What I don't know is whether
other libraries are paying this same kind of fee. For example, as
libraries start getting records from their book jobbers rather than
doing cataloging on OCLC, do they pay the "cataloging" price, or the
record upload price? If OCLC can show consistency of practice, then it
would then seem that there was mis-communication between OCLC and
Michigan. That said, if non-member libraries are able to upload their
records into OCLC for $.23, then it becomes advantageous to be a
non-member. If nothing else, I'm hoping that the lawsuit will allow us
to get some facts about OCLC's pricing. It will be a shame, however,
if the parties settle and we don't get the information that would be
revealed in a courtroom.
kc
>
> Daniel
>
>>>> Tim Spalding 08/08/10 10:33 AM >>>
>> I'm not sure why it might be considered a threat. In any event, I
> think this has been more or less the working definition for a while.
>
> Well, for example, Michigan State argued that they did not deserve the
> treatment they got insofar as they were still paying OCLC $85,000
> dollars a year for resource sharing and because:
>
> "We've been OCLC members for 40 years*we're the ones who built this
> database." (Feb 16 LJ article)
>
> It would seem OCLC is underscoring that the two factors cited*paying
> large sums of money and having contributed the records that OCLC
> sells*are not relevant.
>
> Tim
>
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Mon Aug 09 2010 - 11:02:09 EDT