I’ve been following the OCLC policy change stuff from the position of a vaguely interested observer. My local public libraries aren’t members and aren’t affected terribly much, but of course I think the policy changes are a step in the wrong direction, a big and bold one. From a friend’s twitter stream [which I read via LiveJournal] comes this comment which I agree with.
Wow. A research company hired by OCLC seems to be unclear on the difference between a survey and a push poll.
If you haven’t given your feedback yet, even if you’re not an OCLC member, please do.
Sometimes demographics are important. For me they’re critical so I can plan content for podcasts that is responsive. If only serials librarians listened, a discussion of romance novels likely would not do them much good.
My big worry is that with the debate even having to happen, OCLC seems to be a beast no longer fit for purpose. Is OCLC the only way? With tech today, I am not so sure.
I’m really worried by this OCLC review. OCLC appears to have been captured by its own executive and is now acting in its own interests, instead of the interests of its members and the wider community (ICA cooperative principle 7).
My LMS producer cooperative’s first public response to the review (which was along the lines of “how can we best engage with your review?”) was deleted unpublished with the reply “I invite you to make more formal comments.” Huh? Weren’t we asking how? A follow-up email got another null reply.
@Stephen Michael Kellat – we could probably rebuild OCLC fairly quickly with modern communications technology, but we’d still face the same challenges that OCLC has: how to preserve openness and cooperation in the face of ever-increasing IP-privatisation incentives?
@MJ: It probably wouldn’t surprise you to hear that I think part of the answer is encourage libraries that contribute to bibliographic utilities to explicitly share their records under an open data license like the Open Data Commons PDDL. That doesn’t address governance issues in a membership organization like OCLC per se, but does give a way of protecting the data itself against IP capture.