« It's all about links. The Future of Bibliographic Control | Main | Richard Wallis Interviews Jon Udell »
11 December 2007
OCLC and ROI
Posted by Richard Wallis at December 11, 2007 12:03 PM
Steve Oberg has been poking a figurative stick in to a hornets nest recently, daring to question if OCLC gives a good return on investment for all libraries.
I am sure that for some libraries, investment in OCLC provides a good ROI, but I am equally certain that’s not true of all.
... as he said in the comment trail of his post Right on Target last month. It took a while for OCLC's Roy Tennant to respond to Steve's beef, failing to understand why OCLC have hurt him so. I don't think Steve takes OCLC personally, he just thinks there is something very wrong about it.
Coming out of the conversations around this post appears to be a black or white binary choice - you are either for OCLC or against them - you either put your records on to their servers and loose control over their use or you don't and by implication disappear off the face of the [library] earth.
There is a very telling line in Roy's comment:
Sure, we don’t (yet) include every library on the planet as part of our membership, but we’re working on it.
Supposed to be a humorous aside, or not, it does conjure up a vision of Jay Jordan, stroking a cat matching his hair colour, as Commander Bond's nemesis in the next 007 blockbuster - it is futile Mr Bond, you will not be able to stop me once I have control of all the libraries on the Planet.
Getting back to the real debate, and Steve's Answers to Roy Tennant's questions, where he says things such as
OCLC is a not-for-profit membership organization, sure. But in my view, that is true in name only. OCLC behaves in ways that are similar to the businesses you name, and more than that, it has a growing monopoly over library data and services that I think makes a legitimate comparison to say, Microsoft’s monopoly
and
my “root beef(s)” are, including OCLC’s control of library (MARC) data, its growing monopoly of library data and services, what I believe are high costs of many of its services
Of course what is missing from the equation is competition. From an OCLC member libraries point of view, because of the ceding of control over their own use of their own data, there is no easy way for them to look at competing offerings to what they get from OCLC.
Coming from an ILS vendor with a passion for openly sharing data, offering choice between services, and building a platform and ecosystem in which any and all organisations can compete, my view is obviously not impartial and very different from those who preach the OCLC gospel.
My personal opinion based on spending ten years with BLCMP (a not-for-profit library cooperative with the aggregation and sharing of Marc records at its core - sounds somewhat familiar) before we became Talis, is that OCLC are trapped in an increasingly inappropriate business model. A model based upon the value in the creation and control of data. Increasingly, in this interconnected world, the value is in making data openly available and building services upon it. When people get charged for one thing, but gain value from another, they will become increasingly uncomfortable with the old status quo.
It is not my place to tell OCLC what to do, but I will offer a little bit of advice - listen to your memberscustomers, the silent majority may not always be right. You may protest that you are not commercially marketing product, but "markets are conversations" is still very relevant.
Technorati Tags: OCLC, Members, ROI, ILS, Vendors, Talis, Library
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.talis.com/mt/mt-tb.r280.cgi/1127
