ILS Vendors, Library Bloggers React to SkyRiver/III Lawsuit Against OCLC
By David Rapp Aug 2, 2010The lawsuit filed last week against OCLC by bibliographic services company SkyRiver Technology Solutions and library automation company Innovative Interfaces (III) is the talk of the library community, including some concern about OCLC (if not specific support for the plaintiffs) from library automation companies as well as big-picture analyses from some library bloggers.
SkyRiver and III, two companies owned and founded by Jerry Kline, filed their complaint on July 28, charging OCLC with antitrust violations and anticompetitive business practices.
OCLC said it would issue a statement after a legal review; a statement is expected soon.
III in the lead?
While SkyRiver has taken the lead on the suit, some in the library community see the role of the more-established III as crucial. "III (let's be clear who's behind this lawsuit--they have some nerve hiding behind SkyRiver's skirts) needs to stop OCLC, fast," wrote Karen Schneider in her Free Range Librarian blog.
In the suit, SkyRiver and Innovative accuse OCLC with "attempting to monopolize the market for integrated library systems by anticompetitive and exclusionary agreements, policies and practices." OCLC's cloud-computing-based ILS called Web-scale Management Services (WMS) poses competition to III and other ILS vendors.
ILS vendors: wait-and-see
LJ contacted several ILS vendors for comment on the suit. At this early stage, some have adopted a wait-and-see attitude.
Bill Schickling, president and CEO of Polaris Library Systems, said of the suit, "It was not something I was expecting." But he said that "eliminating choice for libraries for anything--for ILS, or for any of the products or services they need--is not good for libraries."
Gary Rautenstrauch, CEO of SirsiDynix, told LJ, "We cannot comment on the specifics of the legal proceedings, however, I've always believed that competition is good for libraries and in turn, for library users. We are all invested in the success of libraries, and so we are confident and hopeful that whatever the resolution, it will be decided with the best interest of libraries in mind."
ILS vendors: concern about OCLC
Some other vendors, without specifically backing the plaintiffs, seemed to share some of their concerns. Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris North America, emailed LJ the following statement:
"OCLC is, of course, a major asset for the library profession. However, some of their decisions in recent years however have been troubling. Particularly for those of us who must deal with their data usage policies and product offerings without the advantage they're afforded by those policies and their non-profit tax status.
"We need to remember that OCLC is playing a dual role: as a membership organization building assets such as WorldCat, and as a commercial vendor marketing solutions, products and services. The problems start when they leverage the first to meet the commercial goals of the second.We're hopeful this action will clarify the situation and result in a fair and competitive environment for the library profession."
Vinod Chachra, president and CEO of VTLS, told LJ that his company does cooperate with OCLC in many ways; in some cases they are VTLS's partners, while in others VTLS and OCLC are competitors. (For example, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's Lupton Library is in the process of replacing its VTLS Virtua ILS to become an early adopter of OCLC's WMS.)
"Over the years, I have felt that some of the practices that OCLC have aren't conducive to the growth of some other businesses," Chachra told LJ. "On the other hand, [OCLC] do provide a very important, essential service that smaller organizations simply couldn't do."
Asked what he thinks will emerge from the suit, Chachra said he believed that the parties would reach a compromise. "There will some course adjustment," he said. "I don't think there will be any dramatic change, but there'll be some course correction here."
A course correction for OCLC?
Prominent library bloggers also weighed in. Schneider also saw a course correction, in her comment on an LJ Insider post. The lawsuit, she wrote, "could either be the worst thing to happen to OCLC or the best. Ideally, OCLC will prevail in court but take this as a cautionary tale that will help accelerate the positive changes we have been seeing in the last couple of years."
Her own post on the lawsuit takes a similarly wide-angle view:
"My more passionate, from-the-heart assessment: OCLC is a galumphing behemoth, often clumsily distant from its own kith and kin, with chronic governance issues, a deficit of social acumen, and a palpable mistrust of its membership. But OCLC is our behemoth--yours and mine. If we are going to have a worldwide catalog, it's going to be a behemoth. Better it be a behemoth that needs to be not-so-gently bumped toward transparency and member participation than a for-profit behemoth in it for itself."
In the lawsuit, hits and misses
Librarian and consultant Karen Coyle, on her blog Coyle's InFormation, analyzed what she sees as the stronger and weaker aspects of the suit.
In Coyle's view, the case contains two potential "smoking guns": the claim that OCLC is using differential pricing "to specifically prevent OCLC members from becoming SkyRiver customers" and "the claim that OCLC paid cash ‘inducements' to university officials and paid for ‘luxury trips to expensive resorts to obtain their commitments to promote OCLC products,'" an aspect that was also the subject of an LJ Insider post.
"Both of these are extremely damaging to OCLC if they are true," Coyle wrote.
Coyle was skeptical about other parts of the complaint, however, such as the claim that OCLC is "rapidly gaining market share in the ILS market."
"Can they supply the figures to support this rapid gain in market share?" she wrote. "They do state the number of WorldCat Local installations...but WCL is not an ILS (even though it may eventually become the basis for one)." (WorldCat Local is being used as the discovery layer of WMS.)
She was also puzzled by "the repeated insistence that OCLC should give access to the WorldCat database to potential competitors." She wrote:
"I had always assumed that the goal was to allow libraries to provide their bibliographic records freely to anyone they wished, including for-profit companies. I see that as very different from giving competitors direct access to WorldCat. It seems to me that the former goal would be very easy to argue, but direct access to OCLC's own database seems much more difficult to justify."
