[DCRM-L] OCLC's IR webinar (May 13)

[Lapka, Francis]

Yesterday's webinar on the demise of Institutions Records and the transition to Local Bibliographic Data was primarily a Q-and-A. Compared to the discussion that Yale catalogers had with an OCLC rep in April, there seemed much less ambiguity that OCLC has no plans to provide access to the local data of any institution other than your own, no matter how much we say that this is important to us. Moderators held firm to the talking point: OCLC data suggests that its users don't care about IRs.

It's tempting to think that the OCLC data is somehow wrong, but I'm inclined to accept their conclusion at face value: users who care about copy-specific descriptions generally don't see OCLC as a useful discovery tool. So is there much point in investing energy trying to make OCLC fulfill a role for which it is ill-suited? If we want a mechanism that enables searching of copy-specific data across institutions, we should probably look elsewhere.

Francis







Francis Lapka  *  Catalog Librarian

Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts

Yale Center for British Art

203.432.9672  *  francis.lapka at yale.edu<mailto:francis.lapka at yale.edu>


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