Who’s record is it anyway?
There are a number of good posts in the library blogosphere about the OCLC’s change in the. Two especially good ones are Terry Reese’s post and that of Ed Corrado. As someone who has been working with the WorldCat Search API, I’ve been watching the discussion with interest. I’m a big fan of many of the new services that OCLC has been providing over the last year. However, their change management approach to this policy stuff has been atrocious. By engaging with the library community OCLC could have produced a much better policy and avoided lots of scenario-oriented questions.
By the same token, I think that we’re a little too fixated on the question of “Who’s record is it anyway?”. The largest percentage of the records in UH’s catalog are copy cataloging records, a tiny percentage are original cataloging. What this means is in my mind is that the majority of the records in our catalog were created by someone else. Maybe we added some local info but ultimately in my mind that doesn’t make them ours. (You may disagree, feeling that libraries have “purchased” the records) But they aren’t really OCLC’s either are they? Which leads me to what I believe should be the real question in this discussion “What rights do libraries wish to have for records obtained from OCLC?”
In contrast, OCLC should be asking themselves, “what rights do they want to have for records contributed to OCLC?” Framing the discussion in this fashion I think is much more useful than arguing over who owns what.
So as a library what rights would I want?
- Perpetual use – once I’ve downloaded something from OCLC I’ve for the right to use it forever period end of story. This promotes a bunch of things including the LOCKSS principle in the event something happens to OCLC
- Right to share – records I’ve downloaded I’ve got the right to share with others
This means share in any fashion which the library sees fit, be it Z39.50 access, SRU/W, OAI, or transmission of records via other means - Right to migrate format – Eventually, libraries may stop using MARC or need to move records into a non-MARC system. So libraries need the right to transform their records
(These are the rights I see as most important but you may see others which you should feel free to post in the comments.)
If OCLC gives libraries these rights will they be diminishing the ability to generate revenue? I don’t believe so. Ultimately, what will make or break OCLC is its services not its data. The data is important but bibliographic data exists in other places and other vendors have a potential to give OCLC a run for their money in the data arena. OCLC can fill a niche much better by providing services which gather and aggregate data from disparate source and make that data available in open standards compliant machine-readable ways, by providing service architectures, and by acting as a global application services provider.
Very nice summary, very inline with my thoughts.
Isn’t there an open access issue also? If so many records were created with public funds, shouldn’t they be free (in every sense), at least in the countries that created them? I can see that OCLC adds value to many records by having other libraries contribute, but this isn’t always the case, and I don’t think they have a claim to them at all.
Not all these records are necessarily created with public funds. OCLC members range from the Library of Congress and public universities libraries to private college/university libraries and special libraries. Also I feel like to make the records available open access someone has assert ownership over them and say they have the right to make the records available open access. Does anyone really have the right to do this? Did any one institution contribute all the records to OCLC? Not really. (I’m guessing LOC contributed a ton, but not all) IMHO, focusing on the ownership issue is such a sticky complicated mess that it is likely get libraries and OCLC absolute no where.
Ownership is a tricky question – assertion of copyright is even trickier and it is copyright that underpins the ‘rights’ being discussed here. Rob Styles has provided an excellent insight into the legal side of this.
I think we must separate out the legal ‘how’ from the motivation behind the ‘why’ OCLC are changing in the way that they are.
I personally believe that we should encourage OCLC’s change to become a relevant force in the post-Web 2.0 era for the good of libraries (members and/or customers or not). I’m not sure they have yet realised that their motivations need to change far more than they have so far to be successful at it.
All in all, iut really doesn’t matter who owns it anyhow. It shouldn’t be owned in the first place. OCLC grants records to a large amount of institutions who contribute quality cataloging records, and due to copy cataloging, we librarians are contributing to authoritative system. So there’s 1) no reason to have a system of separate records unique to individual libraries, 2) if there’s a need to isolate the character of that record for a particular institution, the original record should contain some kind of cross-reference to that information, or 3) in conjunction to the 2nd, reorganizing the OCLC structure to begin to accept open source records, that would be community driven (i.e a WikiPedia type concept).
So that we can hear what OCLC’s thoughts are on this I recorded a Talking with Talis podcast conversation with Karen Calhoun and Roy Tennant over on the Panlibus Blog, in which they explore in depth the intention, details and ramifications of this new policy.
The OCLC point of view in their answers make interesting listening for all concerned about the policy.