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

[Laurence S. Creider]

Thank you, Francis.  This can save our community much time.  If I sound
cranky, it is largely the result of experience.

OCLC's strength has been a constant focus on the economics of what they
do.  This has enabled them to ingest most of their competitors over the
course of close to half a century.  The company is a business with a
primarily non-profit clientele with non-business priorities.  This has
made for some interesting dancing over the years as well as the support of
some useful activities, such as the OCLC research group and the work on
special collections and digital preservation.

A clear example of this was the way OCLC ingested WLN and its superior
authority control.  After some attempts to make use of the authority
system, they simply abandoned its ability to control uniform titles
(100/240 combination) and series.  The adaptation to the IR can now be
seen for what it was, a temporary mechanism to stifle criticisms of the
absorption of RLG.

What I see as OCLC's primary weakness is not unrelated to its business
model.  The master record concept is so deeply embedded in OCLC
architecture that it has time and again driven decisions that I believe
harm the interests of its clients and customers.  We see that with the IR,
which was pretty useless to those of us not members of RLIN, in the
authority control module, in the deficiencies of WorldCat local, in the
needless proliferation of duplicate records, etc.  I think we will also
see it in OCLC's move to WorldShare, which will suffer from the some of
the same shortcomings.

I think that OCLC is attempting to get out of the straitjacket imposed by
its basic bibliographic architecture, but it has not seriously undertaken
the revision of a structure that is almost as old as MARC.  For all the
massive amount of good OCLC has done, it is in danger of obsolescence
unless the basic system and the attitudes that assume that system are
replaced.  You can layer new technology on top of old for only so long.

In the meantime, we probably need to become accustomed to our place on the
list of OCLC priorities.  OCLC is what it is and cannot be expected to act
contrary to its nature.  We are a small, if vocal, group of "customers,"
and OCLC is getting big enough to ignore us. Fortunately, the BSC and its
friends and relations have a long history of doing by themselves what
needs to be done.

Apologies if I have offended some of the really good folks who work at
OCLC and make valiant efforts at representing the needs of the archives
and special collections community.  Folks like Jackie Dooley and Ricky
Erway do wonderful things and are not the object of any comments that
might be construed as negative.

Larry
-- 
Laurence S. Creider
Head, Archives and Special Collections Dept.
University Library
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, NM  88003
Work: 575-646-4756
Fax: 575-646-7477
lcreider at lib.nmsu.edu

On Thu, May 14, 2015 8:27 am, Lapka, Francis 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
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> Francis Lapka  *  Catalog Librarian
>
> Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts
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> Yale Center for British Art
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> 203.432.9672  *  francis.lapka at yale.edu<mailto:francis.lapka at yale.edu>
>
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>