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

[Will Evans]

Are we not users?

I am vexed by OCLC's attitude and more than a little disheartened. Given
our small numbers, data driven decisions hold little promise for
accommodating present and future concerns of the rare materials community.

While we are not an IR library, we frequently use the information within
those records to aid in identification, when navigating a sea of inferior
records.

How did a feudal business model, where we create the product but have no
voice in how that product is maintained or delivered, survive into the 21st
century?


*Will Evans*

*Chief Rare Materials Catalog Librarian*

*Library of the Boston Athenaeum*

*10 1/2 Beacon Street*

*Boston, MA   02108*



*Tel:  617-227-0270 ext. 224*

*Fax: 617-227-5266 *

*www.bostonathenaeum.org <http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/>*






On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Lapka, Francis <francis.lapka at yale.edu>
wrote:

>  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
>
>
>



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