OCLC: the Microsoft of the Library World?

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Recently Roy Tennant joined OCLC and explained his reasons for taking this step in a post on the Library Journal: Digital Libraries blog. Roy is someone whom I admire and respect, a visionary and great communicator about technology and libraries. He has done, and continues to do, a huge amount of great things.

When I saw Roy’s posting I decided (maybe foolishly) to write a comment on it (see it here). In that comment I mentioned that while I respected his decision, I didn’t really agree that “OCLC is us” and I used that forum to label OCLC as the Microsoft of the library world. I had also used that characterization in a comment posted to The FRBR Blog a few days before. This drew the ire of at least one OCLC staff member who commented on how easy it was to use labels.

I have thought this way about OCLC for years. It isn’t something new that I came up with recently. To me, OCLC is an entity always to be reckoned with in terms of library technology in the same way that Microsoft is all-pervasive in personal computing generally. That doesn’t mean that all that they do or that their business model as a whole is laudable and always good for libraries. There are other comparisons that seem to fit, including what I think are over-priced services that most libraries seem to blithely accept without critical evaluation of whether they truly meet our needs, a fierce protectiveness of intellectual property that really doesn’t belong to them (in my opinion) in the first place but instead belongs with individual libraries who’ve actually created that intellectual content.

I think there are pros and cons in evaluating OCLC. My position, such as it is, is simply that we as a library community should be wary of monopolies of any sort, that we do not just accept without questioning the premise that OCLC’s approach is the best or in the best interests of libraries, and that we value diversity in terms of options for systems and services available to us in fulfilling the missions of our individual libraries.

  • http://www.librarianinblack.net <![CDATA[Sarah Houghton-Jan (Librarian in Black)]]>

    Yes, absolutely yes, thank you for saying what has been in my head for a long time. OCLC is a member organization. But it is also a monopoly. And, as you say,that is something that should always be questioned.

  • <![CDATA[Steve]]>

    Sarah,

    Thanks for your comment, which gives me a bit of encouragement that I wasn’t totally out of my mind about this particular post.

    Steve

  • <![CDATA[carol o]]>

    Hi Steve. I completely agree with your assessment. OCLC’s is a monopoly, and it’s a vendor–and while neither of those labels are inherently “bad,” we certainly should not cut the organization any more slack than we cut any other library vendor to whom our libraries are beholden. And yeah it kind of skeeves me that much of OCLC seems to be built on the back of intellectual work done by individual library catalogers, work that OCLC seems eager to leverage to separate ends. There’s kind of a half-formed notion in my head that the workflow the OCLC model engenders at many libraries actually has not been good for cataloging as a whole, which of course is a deep irony.

    One way OCLC could convince me that they’re truly a member organization though, with the best interests of libraries at heart, would be to FRBRize all their member libraries’ individual library catalogs for free. And I don’t mean via WorldCat local, but in analyzing our records per their algorithm and then handing those records back to us to do what we will. After all, the majority of the original bib records were created by individual library catalogers, and our fees certainly helped pay for any R&D. How about it, OCLC?

  • http://www.familymanlibrarian.com/ <![CDATA[Steve]]>

    Carol, that’s a great idea (OCLC to FRBRize local catalog records)! And yes, I wonder about how or whether the OCLC-dominated workflow for cataloging has been detrimental in some ways.

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  • http://roytennant.com/ <![CDATA[Roy Tennant]]>

    “carol o”,
    That is an interesting idea, and one that may be worth pursuing if we can determine what, if anything, you would be able to do with these “FRBRized records” once they were produced for you. One of the problems is that our present integrated library systems (ILS) are mostly not set up to deal with such grouped records. We can’t simply hand you a smaller set of records than you gave us, that would be mostly useless. You need to have a system that can take advantage of FRBR relationships. In other words, although you can find out right now which items you have that may be related by using the OCLC xISBN service (see http://worldcat.org/affiliate/webservices/xisbn/app.jsp ), it is really more complicated than that. You may need to have a system that can deal with a grouped display but also allow someone to see the individual items that are part of that group. So although the initial idea is intriguing, I think it requires a bit more thought to be something that we could consider as a service to provide to our members. But I really want to know if this is something you could put to work today in your ILS, so if it is, let me know directly at roy_tennant@oclc.org. Thanks!

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