"We Have To Destroy Sharing To Save It" | Peer to Peer Review
A dissenting opinion in the case of Goliath v. Goliath Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MNAug 19, 2010
I should probably start with some disclaimers.
- I am not a lawyer.
- I am not a cataloger.
- I am not an economist.
- I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party.
But OCLC was so asking for it. I'm not at all inclined to file an amicus brief on behalf of SkyRiver, but I'm not surprised they have filed an anti-trust compliant against OCLC.
The specter of a for-profit cataloging and ILS vendor suing a non-profit library collective should make me grab a pitchfork and head straight for the library barricade to join the defense, but not this time. OCLC does not act like a non-profit or a library collective, but rather acts like a business, one that doesn't like competition and bullies desperate libraries that look for less expensive cataloging utilities.
A recent statement from Larry Alford, chair of OCLC's board, and CEO Jay Jordan states that they feel the complaint has no legal merit, that because it is now in court it will take some time to resolve the issue, but that they will meanwhile carry on with their many initiatives. They do seem to acknowledge that the means of sharing resources that OCLC embraced back in 1971 has changed and costs may come down for members, though it's not entirely clear whether those cost reductions will come as libraries switch their business from other ILS vendors to OCLC's new product, or if OCLC is acknowledging that cloud computing is less expensive to provide than it was when it OCLC was founded.
Business as usual
I have no doubt that a solid, reliable, and technologically innovative union catalog for the world's libraries is A Good Thing. I just don't buy the argument that it can only be achieved through one organization fending off all challenges to a top-heavy business model that, according to the organization's 2008 IRS Form 990, includes a compensation package for its CEO that is well over a million dollars and payments higher than the average librarian's salary for many of the otherwise-employed board members. (It is unusual for board members of non-profits to receive compensation.) If OCLC is going to act like a business, it shouldn't have special dispensation to operate without competition.
The tragic irony is that OCLC believes it can't survive if others can share the records that we willingly share, because the benefits of sharing was the whole rationale for creating OCLC in the first place.
How about a little respect?
It's that infamous Vietnam-era motto in new clothing: we have to disable sharing in order to save it. I don't believe it for a minute. I do believe that libraries would willingly support an open-source, open access, open-minded organization that could take advantage of new operating models enabled by the very different technical landscape available to us now than when OCLC laid its foundations. Joseph Lucia of Villanova University put it well:
While most of us in the library world understand OCLC's interest in preserving a revenue base that keeps it viable as an organization working for and on behalf of libraries, the real challenge of the moment is that emerging open data and open source technologies require deeper library collaboration and less restrictive frameworks for the development of new tools and services. This lawsuit is unfortunate in many ways, because it was avoidable. The key development we need to see within OCLC to get past this is a sustainable business framework that positions OCLC as a non-proprietary partner in support of common resources and the intellectual commons that is at the heart of the library mission. Perhaps this is a teachable moment in which we can re-activate a serious conversation about how that might happen.
Karen Schneider cautions librarians not to evaluate the lawsuit on the basis of who can provide the cheaper alternative (which she likens to Wal-Mart's low, low prices), but on long-term sustainability and innovation. That said, she thinks maybe it's time to talk about how OCLC relates to its membership and what future directions it should take.
I am less sanguine that OCLC is quite ready to embrace an open and sustainable model that acts more like libraries and less like a business. It's not easy to turn around an organization that drank the corporate Kool Aid years ago and doesn't embrace the opportunities we now have to share widely, more cheaply, opening more avenues for innovation. It's embarrassing to have such an important library cooperative act like a lumbering behemoth. And yet a lot of good, creative, tech-savvy people work for it. What gives?
Socially unacceptable
The chefs in the Scholarly Kitchen have been wondering, too. Kent Anderson wonders if social media hasn't surpassed what OCLC was established to do. He writes,
While OCLC's collective database is not called "social media," the bibliographic databases it controls are generated through the independent submissions of librarians everywhere, then resold to the same community at a high price . . . Is OCLC a leftover from the era in which computing power and connectivity were scarce and expensive, and when contributing "love and diligence" into this rare bit of infrastructure was really the only alternative? Or is it something more?
It seems to me (while reiterating the disclaimers, above) that OCLC does not think highly of its rank and file membership. It doesn't believe that libraries are willing to do big things for love, that we won't put money behind a resource for the public good, that the only way for them to save us from ourselves is to wall our collective records off from intruders, charge us lots of money to ensure the wall is impregnable, and reward us with small sums of money when we do some original cataloging-or threats if we seek alternatives.
I am no fan of the companies suing OCLC, but I don't consider OCLC's actions when Michigan State tried to continue to contribute to OCLC while finding a cheaper cataloging utility a simple public relations misstep. It was business as usual for a company that had to get an (apparently unpublished) act of the state legislature to give OCLC non-profit status after the state Supreme Court affirmed a tax court's decision in 1984. The justices wrote in their opinion:
OCLC's activities more closely resemble those of a publisher of library materials or a data base firm specializing in information retrieval, such as Lexis or the New York Times Information Bank, rather than that of a library. Although OCLC's service may greatly enhance the ability of libraries to better serve the public, OCLC essentially offers a product to charitable institutions, for a fee exceeding its cost, and, as the board concluded, is not itself a charitable organization.
Rick Mason has a suggestion at his Libology blog: break the organization into two distinct parts, one a non-profit that members fund to maintain WorldCat under a share-alike license; the other a business that could compete with similar businesses. But as he acknowledges, that probably isn't in the cards. And the innovation that libraries have funded in the past would be treated (as it is now) as proprietary information. I think libraries are willing to fund research activities; I just think the current practice of acting like a business while seeking protection as a non-profit is not serving libraries' collective interests.
Don't look behind that curtain!
I will leave it to Karen Coyle to parse the specific claims in the lawsuit, which she has done brilliantly. But it dismays me that I'm asked to entrust an important public resource to an organization supposedly run by its members but which will not make information available that would let us members figure out a more financially sustainable and morally defensible way to share catalog records. As Coyle points out in a comment, OCLC does not reveal the financials needed to conduct such an analysis, which she could so ably do.
I'm supposed to believe this is a member owned cooperative, that if I want change I just need to speak up? Yeah, sure, and all I have to do if I don't like something my government does is contact my legislators and voila, it will be fixed. I contact them all the time, but so far that hasn't accomplished a whole lot.
I can see that the legal waters in this case are murky, but I am totally in agreement with Coyle on her final recommendation: "FREE THE DATA." Though I also admit, I'm rather taken with the recommendation of an anonymous respondent who whispers in lower case: "someone should post the worldcat database to wikileaks."
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), has just been published by Minotaur Books.
