On recent OCLC announcements

The biblioblogosphere has been all a buzz and rightly so about OCLC’s recent announcement regarding moving library management services into the cloud. For me the announcement isn’t really a surprise, I’ve been watching what OCLC’s been up to for the last 2 years, thinking that they must have something big planned. You don’t make the acquisitions they’ve made without something in mind, unless you want to run your business into the ground. At the same time I was slightly surprised to see that they were going to give away pieces of WorldCat Local “for free”.

So what’s my take? I think OCLC is trying to change their business model to provide a new set of core services for their members, allowing members to move some business processes into the cloud and thus reap economies of scale. IMHO economies of scale are a good thing. I don’t believe that our libraries are that different that we need to all run our own ILSs and systems. Furthermore some problems are better solved on a larger scale. OCLC has the potential power to bring together libraries and librarians to work on problems that would normally be outside the scope of any individual library, even a massive ARL to solve. Digital libraries are another example of this and if OCLC were smart they would given this area the attention it deserves by providing more robust offerings in this arena.

But I digress. In an age of open data the only way for OCLC to succeed is to provide compelling SERVICES not content to its members. The ever evolving OCLC Grid Services are one piece of that as are these other new offerings. Moving the ILS into the cloud will provide OCLC with tremendous opportunities to provide other services to members. Authentication for one, but also the ability to share local library data beyond what is in the current registry. Imagine if information about subject liasions could be push to the cloud so that users could easily see it as part of their search. And if the registry or the new ILS-like platform contained information about your database subscriptions, then this could be used to make recommendations to users. Also because of their sheer size, OCLC has the opportunity to provide recommendation services as well if they can aggregate usage and user data from various systems. The possibilities are great.

Thus far I’ve focused on what I see as the positives aspects of OCLC’s plans, but there are dangers in such as a move as well. I don’t believe that folks concerns about the potential dangers of this model in combination with OCLC’s proposed changes to its record use and transfer policy is unfounded. My own example in this area? Many libraries in Texas belong to the Texas Digital Library which among other things is a joint repository of ETDs. Would cataloging our ETDs in OCLC and also giving the records to TDL be a violation of the policy? The languages makes me seriously wonder. I want to believe that OCLC will show good judgement in such matters but… I think assurances are necessary to prevent libraries from ending up (intentionally or unintentionally) in an untenable position. At the same time, OCLC’s announcement and plans have the potential to exacerbate the divide between the library haves and have nots. OCLC members will have significant advantages over non-members. I worry about libraries unable or unwilling (due to changes in the record use policy) to become OCLC members. It seems OCLC recognizes some of this and is trying to make membership advantageous enough to expand their member base. However, their actions could be interpreted as creating disincentives for non-members by making the difference between members and non-members so distinct.

Wherever you stand on the record use policy itself, what is important to take away for OCLC’s announcement is that services are moving into the cloud. There are now robust technologies available to support cloud computing, whether that be streaming audio and video, hosting data, or the entire ILS apparatus. Libraries need to come to terms with what this means for themselves and their users in order to make good decisions about choosing to move traditionally in-house efforts into the cloud and reallocating resources as a result.