Disruptive Library Technology Jester » cooperatives

Views on Sharing (or, What Do We Want From OCLC?)

Peter Murray — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 01:51:16 +0000

Within the span of a recent week we’ve had two views of the OCLC cooperative. In one we have a proposition that OCLC has gone astray from its core roots and in the other a celebration of what OCLC can do. One proposes a new mode of cooperation while the other extols the virtues of the existing cooperative. Both writers claim — independently — to “talk to librarians” and represent the prevailing mood of the profession. Can these two viewpoints be reconciled?

“Too Many Cooks?”

The pro-establishment view first. In a post by Chip Nilges on the OCLC Cooperative Blog, we get the view that the backing of the wider librarian community is key to OCLC being able to negotiate with content vendors like H.W. Wilson. Chip’s “talk to librarians” quote is:

I spend quite a bit of time talking both to librarians and industry partners–publishers, booksellers, Web-technology providers, search engine companies–all kinds of people doing interesting things in our space. And in those talks, there is often a discussion of one of the following: content, technology or community. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that the best results come from places where all three come together.

Chip’s post is short but clear in its view that the community of OCLC members is something special and that it adds value to member libraries.

“The Cooperative We Need”

The other perspective comes from Carl Grant in a post on his Ex Libris blog. His thesis is that OCLC has an important role to play in adding value to bibliographic data, but that its motives are too intertwined with for-profit interests to carry out this role effectively. Carl’s “talk to librarians” quote is:

It appears to me that the interests of the OCLC we know today do not appear to be in total alignment with the needs and interests of its overall actual membership. Perhaps they are in alignment with the interests of the Board, Council, and other governing and administrative arms, but the feeling I get in talks with librarians is that it is not in alignment with what they want. As I talk to librarians, across the country today, I hear that what they want is an organization, a cooperative that is focused on developing and providing open and collaborative library content and services that are widely accessible by all in order that they (the librarians) can focus on re-establishing and/or maintaining the value of libraries in our society.

Carl goes on to propose the creation of a utility that aggregates the ratings and rankings of individual users into a database that can enhance the relevance ranking of the emerging generation of discovery layer products.

My Thoughts

This “talk to librarians” thread through the two posts makes me reflect on a question I asked earlier on DLTJ: “What Does it Mean to be a Member of OCLC?” Although I probably haven’t talked to nearly the number of librarians as Chip and Carl, in my discussions within the profession I still haven’t come to a resolution to this basic question. That question itself is tied to another question coming through in the contrast between these two posts: What Do We Want From OCLC?

Carl describes the problem in his post. When a not-for-profit vendor acquires a significant number of for-profit companies (and spins them back out again), how can we (members, vendors, and the library community in general) understand how the mix of commercial and non-commercial interests are playing out at the management level? Can the OCLC that is the bibliographic utility, the metadata switch between bibliographic-based services, and the R&D braintrust co-exist with the for-profit businesses, motivations, and operations? Or, to put it more sharply, does the negotiation of H.W. Wilson content for use on the subscription-based WorldCat database hinder the evolution of discovery layers that being developed by companies that don’t have the tax-advantaged not-for-profit status? (And don’t forget about the allegations of anti-competitive behavior in the SkyRiver/Innovative-versus-OCLC lawsuit.)

In closing this section, I want to pull out and emphasize another quotation from Carl’s post:

In the end, all of these business initiatives, and now resulting lawsuit, strongly work against OCLC being able to do what it does best—building collaboration, content, and related services as a non-profit entity to serve the larger profession.

Agreed.

Carl’s Grand Idea

What might get lost if you only closely read the first half of Carl’s post — as it initially did for me — is the second half where he describes the concept for enhancing WorldCat in a manner that benefits all…both library members and commercial entities. He does this by noting that the “valuable points of open source software” can be applied — in a social media fashion — to a service that aggregates usage, ratings, and comments in a way that advances relevance ranking of discovery tools. Now initially the mind swirls with concerns of privacy and informed user consent in gathering this data in one central pool. I don’t think we know enough yet in the library community about building privacy-robust systems that meet an American librarian’s information privacy ethos. But done right it also has the ability to build a reputation-based social feedback loop that adds important new information to the bibliographic utility. And because of its better-when-bigger characteristic, only a neutral party like the not-for-profit OCLC cooperative could serve as an aggregator and distributor of this data.

I highly recommend reading Carl’s post and thinking about ways of answering the question “What Do We Want From OCLC?” I commend Carl for his courage and vision in articulating his points and proposing something new for the profession to drive towards.

OCLC and the Associated Press — Two Sides of the Same Information Provider Coin?

Peter Murray — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:52:29 +0000

I’ve run across a striking similarity between the bibliographic utility business and the newswire business, particularly in the area of cooperatives. Two cooperatives — OCLC on the bibliographic utility side and the Associated Press on the newswire side — have the same pattern of activity:

both are membership organizations,
both seek to amplify the efforts of members (bibliographic records in one case, news stories and photographs in the other),
both are reacting to threats to content under its purview, and
both have prominent members experimenting with new forms of content delivery and use.

I’ll admit that this comparison between OCLC and the AP is not fully formed, but it has been running around in my mind long enough that it seemed appropriate to put it here. Feel free to run with this further if you think it has merit, or tell me that I’m nuts.

Membership Organizations

OCLC’s “About” page describes itself this way:

Founded in 1967, OCLC Online Computer Library Center is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing the rate of rise of library costs.¹

Now, admittedly, OCLC is more than a bibliographic utility for sharing cataloging records, but, for the sake of this comparison, I’m focusing only on the cooperative cataloging part.

AP’s “About” page describes itself this way:

AP’s mission is to be the essential global news network, providing distinctive news services of the highest quality, reliability and objectivity with reports that are accurate, balanced and informed. AP operates as a not-for-profit cooperative with more than 4,000 employees working in more than 240 worldwide bureaus. AP is owned by its 1,500 U.S. daily newspaper members. They elect a board of directors that directs the cooperative.

For those of us in the library field, that probably sounds a great deal like OCLC’s mission.

Reaction to Threats

The migration to a very digital world has posed a threat to the economic models that underly the activities of the cooperatives. As digital information has become easier to copy, it has become harder for the cooperatives to exert control over that information and receive payment-for-use of that information. In OCLC’s case, the response was the Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records and the corresponding reaction by the community. The original draft OCLC policy called for restrictions on sharing records and marking records with a 996 field that attributed the source of the record to OCLC.

Graphic from the AP 'Protect, Point, Pay' internal report.

The AP responded to the threat with a plan called “Protect, Point, Pay — An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online.” It proposes an “hNews format” with copyright protection and “beacon” for tracking usage. It seeks to strengthen the news cooperative by requirement members to use AP-distributed content in such a way that enables this tracking, to draw end users to the AP brand, and to go after redistributers that are using AP-distributed content without permission. The response from its members and the broader community has not been kind.

Members Experimenting

The recent announcements of ‡biblios and SkyRiver and the libraries that are signing up with them makes this contrast even more stark.

On the AP side, the Tribune Company group of newspapers is running an experiment this week to use as little content from the Associated Press wire service as possible. Phil Rosenthal wrote about this on the Chicago Tribune “Tower Ticker” blog, and he continues:

The trial is scheduled to be conducted almost 13 months after Tribune Co. gave the AP a required two-year warning that it might drop the news service, effective Oct. 15, 2010. Tribune Co. said at the time that it was keeping its options open while weighing what role, if any, the AP would play in its future.

During the trial, Tribune Company papers will use as little AP content as possible. The papers will supplement from other sources, including Reuters, the Washington Post, and other news providers. American Public Media’s Marketplace show had a segment last week on this experiment as well.

Conclusions

None. Although I’m able to draw what seem to be striking comparisons between OCLC and the AP, I’m not yet sure what can be learned from them, or what possibly OCLC and the AP can learn from each other. Hence the posting of this admittedly half-baked thesis here. I don’t have time to take the work any further than this, but would be interested to hear the conclusions of someone(s) who decide to pick up this ball and run with it a bit farther.

The text was modified to update a link from https://biblios.net/ to http://biblios.net/ on February 11th, 2011.

Footnotes

As an aside, this notion of “reducing the rate of rise of library costs” has really bothered me, especially lately. What we don’t need is a reduction in the rate of rise; arguably, what we do need is a real reduction in costs from year to year. However, commentary on this aside is probably best explored in a separate post.

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