It’s impossible to judge the merits of the suit announced yesterday (LJ coverage and blog) by SkyRiver and Innovative Interfaces against OCLC, but one sign of the confusion about OCLC’s role comes from one of Dublin, OH-based OCLC’s local papers.
From Business First of Columbus:
SkyRiver and Innovative in the suit lob a host of claims against OCLC, the 43-year-old company that electronically connects library collections around the world through its WorldCat database.
Of course, OCLC is not exactly a company, though its competitors think it behaves like one. According to OCLC:
OCLC is a worldwide library cooperative, owned, governed and sustained by members since 1967. Our public purpose is a statement of commitment to each other—that we will work together to improve access to the information held in libraries around the globe, and find ways to reduce costs for libraries through collaboration.
Some defense of OCLC
The Chronicle of Higher Education, which called OCLC “a major nonprofit library organization,” quoted academic library director and Free Range Librarian blogger Karen Schneider as suggesting that OCLC, in its dispute with Michigan State University, had made a “a strategic error, but I don’t think it was unlawful.”
On her blog today, Schneider offered a defense of OCLC, with some constructive criticism:
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
She also suggested that behind the lawsuit was Innovative Interfaces’ concern over OCLC’s emerging, and competing integrated library system, known as Web-scale Management Services (WMS):
My more pragmatic assessment: when you see a lawsuit over competing technologies, you can be sure some technology is jumping the shark. III (let’s be clear who’s behind this lawsuit–they have some nerve hiding behind SkyRiver’s skirts) needs to stop OCLC, fast, before everyone figures out that because OCLC accidentally created an international cloud-based service forty years ago, OCLC now has an inherent advantage because its technologies are based on web-scale services.
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Related posts:
I had a full day at the ranch so I missed this. One thing that keeps occurring to me is that this suit 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.