Tim has a nice post about OCLC's recent decision to ditch their new license policy and how it reflects on the nature of the OCLC hegemony in the Library community. Jennifer Younger's presentation about the decision is well worth listening to, as it highlights some of the feedback of the member community as well as the self interests of OCLC. It still concerns me that The Board is unable to recognize fully the nature of the current information ecosystem and our role as librarians in ensuring it is open and accessible. The OCLC world is still imbalanced towards the physical manifestation of OCLC (and the revenue stream derived from member's records), and away from a rich online ecosystem that encourages sharing and innovation. I was particularly concerned with the statement "Identify threats to the sustainability of WorldCat and strategies for protecting it against unreasonable use." Duh. That's the whole point that OCLC still fails to get - there is no unreasonable use of this information, as it belongs to everyone, and any attempt to describe a use as unreasonable is itself unreasonable. Listening to Younger's presentation gave me the chills, as it described the "threats" to the "members" information. Please. Stop already. Find another revenue stream and release the records, the information commons will be better off and we will get more out of it than we could ever possibly lose.
I was at OCLC in Ohio last week speaking at the Rethinking Resource Sharing conference (a nice bunch of librarians it is) and without going into detail, my closing keynote was not appreciated by all, due to a slam of the proposed OCLC license (I didn't know about the planned reversal, but likely would have slammed anyway). Why is it that some can't accommodate constructive criticism of our own profession, particularly that as reflected by OCLC? I'm not real sure, but this whole thing does make me a little sad...
Scraped from Thing-ology (LibraryThing's ideas blog)
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