I would like to reiterate what I said at the ALA Midwinter meeting. I really appreciate the articulate comments made by the speakers. What you really end up dealing with are the messy metadata pieces that Peter Murray from OhioLink described. Furthermore it makes no sense to me that for every little project like the one described by the person from Newberry Library, where they were considering working with a commercial vendor to digitize their materials, should require that every library come and bow down to OCLC to have them allow the library to use their records in the project. That really does not scale as a process. You should use the type of free or shared use license that was suggested.

I also dispute Karen Calhoun’s explanation that only 2 % of a library’s records are original cataloging so that’s all they ever paid for. Excuse me. Libraries paid OCLC first time use fees that used to be $1.50 apiece. I believe we paid more than that for a 1.3 million recon project we did with OCLC. So we have literally paid OCLC millions of dollars. I would suggest that the purchasing and legal departments of universities would not allow them to sign up for OCLC under the terms of the proposed policy. So, OCLC is saying, pay us millions of dollars but you can only use those records if we say you can. I just don’t think institutions would agree. Not for these MARC records where the bulk of them could be had from LC for free or for a minimal subscription price.

OCLC is not advancing the interests of its members by trying to exert control over the use of MARC records. As I commented at the meeting, it is solidifying into a lump of rock in the stream and I think there should be a concern that the world will flow past and that will be the end of its usefulness. OCLC needs to have a different business plan instead of just depending on cataloging as the cash cow and then using such a lame policy to try to prop it up. You should put some kind of free use license on the records and charge for cataloging, ILL and other services like timely inclusion in Worldcat.org. Don’t try to rent out the records, or worse prevent their use.

I remember having to argue with developers at OCLC when I first started working there after being in a network. They were afraid to let libraries download MARC records into their local systems and tried to resist allowing that to happen (remember that’s how Innovative Interfaces got started? By screen scraping to do that). Imagine what would have happened if OCLC had maintained that stance and refused to let people download to their ILS’s . They would have gone elsewhere. The genie is out of the bottle. OCLC has not magic word to get it back. They need to move on to innovations, not protect records they never produced in the first place. They should find a way to help LC to continue to produce the many, many records we depend on getting from them. They are the ones who do the bulk of the work.