Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog)

Speaking at Charleston Conference

2009-11-04T15:41:00.002-05:00

Abby was slated to give a talk about LibraryThing at the Charleston Conference, tomorrow. Then, she came down with the flu. So, I'm heading to Charleston, SC as I blog now. I'll be speaking at 12:30.

Anyone who happens to be there, and can lend me an Apple video dongle gets a free teeshirt.

Simultaneous flash-mob cataloging

2009-10-26T22:16:00.004-04:00

On the weekend of October 3-4, we had two simultaneous, two-day, flash-mob cataloging events. Here's the wrap-up:

Central Park School for Children – a small public charter elementary school in Durham, NC
(centralparkschoolforchildren.org, centralparkschool on LT, blog post announcing event)

1,391 books cataloged, barcoded, assigned Dewey numbers, physically labeled the volumes for shelving, uploaded cover images, and shelved. All this was done by 22 catalogers on Saturday and 10 on Sunday.

It's easy to underestimate how many books are in a library, and children's books are particularly notorious (skinny little volumes that they can be), so this flash-mob is heading back to finish up the collection. They don't have a date set (they're thinking early November), so if you live in the area and you'd like to help, you can email erin_stalberg@ncsu.edu for details.

Erin and Laura Abraham presented "Cataloging: Who Knew it was a Community Service?" at the North Carolina Library Association conference this past week. You can download the PowerPoint here.

The Canton Museum of Art in Ohio
(CantonArt.org, CantonArt on LT, blog post announcing event)

Over two days, catalogers managed to add 1,090 books in a total of about 7.5 hours. They had seven catalogers on Saturday, four on Sunday, and a dedicated book lugger (also the father of the flash-mob organizer) for both days.

See more photos here.

Ebook economics: Are libraries screwed?

2009-10-07T02:09:00.012-04:00

"Kindling" by Flickr user oskay

The advance of ebooks will no doubt bring much good. As often with technological change, we probably can't even predict what wonderful new things will emerge! But we can see some serious dangers ahead, and try to deal with them. I see three major areas of concern: to libraries, to physical bookstores and to the freedom to read in unfree countries.

This post explores the first of these—the danger to libraries. There are, of course, arguments to be made about the viability of physical libraries in a digital age—that while libraries aren't just buildings, the building still define much of what they do. That is not my point here.

Instead, I want to advance a pricing argument: that ebooks will end up costing libraries far more than paper books ever did.

Premise: Libraries will need a "library model" for ebooks.

A few libraries, such as NCSU have been experimenting with ebooks. Without exception, they are following a "consumer model," buying a large pool of devices and then buying books locked to individual devices in the pool.

This model is great for experimentation—to test what patrons think of ebooks and figure out what to do with them—but it's not a long-term solution. Digital books locked to individual physical devices are worse than physical books. That is, when you take out a physical book, one book is unavailable. When you take out a Kindle with 100 books on it, 100 books are unavailable. NCSU has bought extra copies when students need another copy in circulation. Obviously that's not a long-term solution.

Because the "consumer model" won't work, libraries will need—and publishers and ebook providers—will create a "library model." The library model will involve a "site license" model—a pool of books, with rights to use them on X devices at a time. Publishers are already talking about this.

Thus, libraries and consumers will be using different models. The market will "split." (I understand that Netlibrary and Ebrary, two library-centered ebook vendors, already used by many libraries, work this way now.)

Economic effect: Libraries are screwed.

With regular books, libraries took advantage of the same deal regular people got, but extracted a lot more value of that deal. That is, a regular person mostly got a single use out of a book; libraries got many more uses. We didn't think of it this way, but libraies had a "site license" of sorts—the so-called "first-sale doctrine."

With the first-sale doctrine sidelined by digital rights management (DRM), publishers will seek to extract the higher value of their books within a library context. This will cause prices to rise.

With physical books, library price discrimination was impossible. Libraries and regular people bought the same stuff, and paid the same prices. If a given edition was pitched to libraries, its price was held in check by the availability of non-library editions. As a result, only purely academic titles had run-away libary prices—think Brill with its $300 monographs.

Once the market is "split," price discrimination is possible. Publishers will charge libraries more for the extra value they get because they can do so without hurting the consumer market. This will cause prices to rise.

The cost of paper books have traditionally been held down by the existence of a secondary market. Copyright is, of course, a legal monopoly on the production of a given work, but once paper copies have been sold, new sales compete to some degree with the used copies out there. If you don't want to pay $242 for Brill's Collected Papers on Greek Colonization, BookFinder lists 25 used copies under $215.

Because ebooks are non-transferable—and if such ability is added, it surely won't allow a consumer to pass an ebook to a library under library terms—no secondary market will exist. Until copyright expires, libraries will have to go to a single source—the publishers who have the copyright monopoly. This will cause prices to rise.

The "library model" will be inevitably pushed toward "rental" not "ownership." As many have remarked, ebooks are already more like "renting" than "owning," with no right of resale and at least the technical ability for the book to vanish at whim. Libraries, afraid of buying goods that a technological change or company bankruptcy will obliterate, will seek to avoid the "lock in" of ownership. Publishers will also see opportunity in offering large "packages" to libraries—packages that provide rental access to a collection that would take years to build up in a traditional buying-and-owning model.

This logic is how libraries were pushed to renting their journals. It's also at work in enterprise software, either de jure or—through regular version upgrade payments—de facto. Libraries will rent, not buy, their ebooks.

The combination of monopoly and rental is dangerous. It's how journal subscriptions have risen faster than inflation for 40 years, and spiked precipitously upward in the last decade. (The classic ARL graphic can be found here.)

The logic of journals is the logic of the site-licensed ebook. Prices will rise unchecked. Some relief may come if the open-access movement goes past scholarly journals into other scholarly publishing—there's really no reason Brill books need to cost $300! But this will take a while, and it will only affect scholarly titles.

Rental means prices will rise.

In the past, libraries could "coast." Collection development was a long-term thing, and libraries could, if necessary, restrict their acquisitions budget in line with financial realities. When times are bad, you buy less. When times are good, you buy more. As long as you have both ups and downs, the library as a whole stays healthy.

Rental will change this. Libraries will only be as good as their last subscription check. This will change the nature of collection development (in both good and bad ways), and give politicians new opportunities for both unsustainable budget growth and budget-cutting during crisis. This may not cost libraries more, but it will put their value on the knife-edge.

What do you think? I've started a discussion topic in the "Librarians who LibraryThing" group.

I'm sure there are lots of good arguments against this post. Here are two that came up as people read earlier drafts.

Jason Griffey argues (by Twitter) that prices will be kept in check by wide availability of pirated versions. This is a good argument. The counter-argument is corporate software. It's not hard to get a free copy of InDesign or Photoshop, but corporations continue to shell out nearly $1,000 for each, because the penalties are so steep.

Another correspondent suggested the "dawning age of biblioplenty"—a world in which "millions of books will be available from almost anywhere"—will act to hold down prices, presumably through what economists call indirect competition.

1,512 libraries in LibraryThing for Libraries

2009-09-29T10:18:00.000-04:00

LibraryThing for Libraries, our enhancements to public and academic library catalogs, continues to advance. The official list shows some 159 "libraries" getting our tags, recommendations and reviews in their catalogs. But many of those 159 "libraries" are really much larger systems.

So, we thought we'd figure out how many individual libraries were using LibraryThing for Libraries, and add them all to LibraryThing Local. It wasn't until we started searching out every member library of every consortium and adding every branch to LibraryThing Local that we realized we had WAY more libraries than we had thought: 1,512!

Some of the biggies include ALS/RSA in Illinois, with over 250 member libraries, NOBLE in Massachusetts, with 28, and the King County Library System in Washington, with 43. Over in Australia, the State Library of Tasmania pretty much covers the island, with some 50 libraries.

LTFL in LibraryThing Local. To get this number, we had to add all the libraries to LibraryThing Local. All LibraryThing for Libraries members get this badge:

We have some other plans for this, of course. But for now we're going to sit back—and dream about an around-the-world trip to visit all of them...

LTFL: now available for Evergreen

2009-09-08T15:40:00.004-04:00

We've been working on adding the LibraryThing for Libraries enhancements to the open-source catalog Evergreen. We've worked out the kinks, and it's ready to roll.

We've integrated both the Catalog Enhancements (tags, tag browser, recommendations, other editions and translations) and the Reviews Enhancement (300,000 LibraryThing reviews, patron reviewing, Facebook app, blog widgets).

If you'd like to see how LTFL looks, check out the catalog of Kent County, Maryland. We owe them a thousand thanks for working with us on making this work.

Sears--Taxonomy--Not Safe for Work

2009-08-20T13:03:00.005-04:00

Screenshots from Sears.com, showing unauthorized headings. The first one could be placeholder text, but the second one suggests to me someone is being let go and is taking out on the subject headings...

Click to see a larger image, and check out the breadcrumb trail.

Update: It was apparently done by changing the URL, which includes the category. A good tech lesson their. But I couldn't get it to work. Maybe it still works for the second one because it's cached.

Glowy magic, wolves and damsels in distress

2009-08-17T21:25:00.005-04:00

Sci-fi/fantasy publisher Orbit has compiled a chart of 2008 Fantasy Cover Elements, charting the prevalence of unicorns and swords, elves and "glowy magic" (a big winner).

I'm disappointed in the minimalist "damsels in distress." As a boy with a good collection of Conan novels, I feel that fantasy covers are all about occasions to show impossibly good-looking women in clothing of dubious practicality. I'm betting, if tallied, chainmail brassieres might well beat out glowy magic.

LTFL: Non-ISBN Matching

2009-07-20T14:04:00.002-04:00

Short Story. We've been going through so many big changes at LibraryThing lately that we let a pretty substantial improvement go by without giving it the fanfare it deserves: the LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) Cataloging Enhancements now pick up many non-ISBN items. All LibraryThing for Libraries libraries will see better coverage (5-15%), and academic libraries with older materials should be especially pleased:

Some examples:

An 1819 edition of Don Quixote, in Spanish at Bowdoin College
A 1952 edition of Tom Jones from King County Library System
A cassette audio recording of Great Expectations from the Great River Regional Library

The coolest thing about the LibraryThing office: Need a photo of an old book? Grab iphone, swivel chair 180 degrees and shoot. Second coolest thing: The only hot Web 2.0 company with a 1774 edition of Terence.

Long Story. Our enhancements usually run on the basis of the ISBN. ISBNs are easy to pick out of the HTML without knowing the structure of the page ( /[0-9Xx]{10,13}/*, if you speak regular expressions*), and most books have them, so they're our primary way of knowing what content to load for a particular page.

However, as a part of our reviews enhancement, we developed a JavaScript library called the LibraryThing Connector that, among other things, screen-scrapes the title and author of the book out of the HTML. This is what allows our reviews to work on any item a library owns, whether or not it is in LibraryThing or has an ISBN. It's tricky stuff, because it requires specific code for every type of library software that we provide reviews for.

To get title-matching therefore, we take the title and author extracted by the Connector and feed it to our own "What Work" fuzzy matching API. Of course, this method is far from foolproof, so we err on the side of caution, only loading enhancement data if we've got a strong match on both the title and the author. We haven't seen any false positives yet, but even with being pretty strict about matching, based on real world stats, we're able to provide around 5-15% more content in the catalog. Academic libraries will get more of a boost out of this, because they tend to have a lot more non-ISBN items than public libraries.

We did this because it's fun and useful and kind of magic, but more importantly because we want to constantly improve our products. LibraryThing for Libraries is a subscription service. Every year when it is time for a library to renew with us, we want it to be clear that they're getting something better from us than they were a year ago, and that even better things are in store for the future. It's more fun and challenging for us that way, but it's also something we know works pretty well as a business strategy too.

In my mind a big reason why LibraryThing.com has succeeded is that a membership comes with an expectation of improvement. We don't call a membership an investment, but you get to expect that you will be able to do more and better and cooler things with LibraryThing over time, and that it will become more valuable to you. As a result of this, our members become deeply involved in the site and how it works, and if a LibraryThing membership is a great investment, members end up making an even greater investment of their knowledge and enthusiasm right back. It's a great thing to be a part of, so I hope it's a philosophy we can keep bringing to the library world as well. — Casey

*Pace Casey, who wrote this post, ISBNs are/([0-9]{9}[0-9X}|97[89][0-9]{10})/i !

Upcoming book: Library Mashups

2009-07-20T12:04:00.003-04:00

If you're interested in Library 2.0 and library technology generally, you might want to pre-order Library mashups : exploring new ways to deliver library data (website), a collection of articles on innovative ways to use (and abuse) library data.

I haven't read it yet, except for the chapter I wrote, "Breaking into the OPAC." I'm looking forward to many, including one on John Blyberg/Darien Library's SOPAC and something on "Zack Bookmaps," an effort to show local library copies of a book, without using OCLC. There's also a chapter on the LibraryThing API and libraries, written by Robin Hastings. Nicole Engard (a LibraryThing author), shepherded the whole thing to completion.

I found the book-process frustrating at times. At their fastest—and multi-author collaborations aren't that—books are slow things. This one took about a year. But the articles still look timely to me, and it's going to be good to hold "my" book in my hands.

LibraryThing for Libraries at ALA: new features and hungry rhinos

2009-07-09T14:58:00.003-04:00

Are you ready for this?

Tim and I will be at the American Library Association's annual conference this year. We have new, new LTFL features to show off. You can find us at booth 2857 in the exhibit hall.

1. New features! We'll be demoing our new catalog enhancers - never before seen by librarians. We'll post an announcement all about the new features in a day or two.

2. An art installation! Yeah, you'll just have to wait and see it. I can't even describe it, other than to say that it takes away ennui.

3. More rhinos! Tim and I are both flying to Chicago with an inflatable rhino in our luggage. We plan on playing "Toss the Rhino", and perhaps if we are feeling extra daring, "Pass the Rhinos".

(Thanks to Brixton for the masticating rhino photo. The rhino tossing one's mine. That's Tim and Casey putting some English on the rhino.)

Categories for your LTFL Reviews

2009-07-02T11:46:00.002-04:00

Teen reviews from Seattle Public Library

Library home page | Get this widget

We've a new feature to LibraryThing for Libraries, suggested by Lare over at the Seattle Public Library. He was looking for a way to show off just some of their reviews—reviews for their summer reading program.

Libraries can now add "categories" for their reviewers to check off—library book club books, Big Read books, reviews by library staff, etc. And the library can show off just one category of reviews in their LTFL blog widget.

Seattle has made blog-widget pages for their kids section, teen section, and even their adult section of the site. By categorizing the reviews into age-related groups, they can feature items in their catalog that would interest the patrons for each demographic.

We'll be releasing some more cool features at American Library Association meeting in Chicago next week.

Project Managers Sought for OSC

2009-06-19T14:22:00.005-04:00

Due to an increase in work commitments for both Laena and David, new
project managers are sought for the Open Shelves Classification project. Below is a status report of the project. Interested leaders should contact Tim Spalding (tim@librarything.com).

OSC status report June 2009:

One year into the project, here is what we have accomplished so far:
-Many wide-ranging discussions were held in the LibraryThing Build
the Open Shelves Classification group and the OSC blog.

-Optional facets were agreed upon initially as the way to handle audience, format, and language.

-An initial list of top level categories was compiled by the end of 2008 and put out for review.

-In January 2009, LibraryThing members tested these categories by applying them to works in LibraryThing using the ClassifyThis feature.

-In January, a brainstorming meeting was held at the ALA midwinter meeting and was attended by librarians and non-librarians.

-In February, the feedback from the testing was used to further refine the top level categories.

-Starting in February and running through May, small groups began to construct the secondary levels for certain categories.

-Throughout the spring, Laena and David did outreach for the project, writing pieces for the PLA blog and the IFLA
newsletter, and reached out to libraries in an unsuccessful search for public library data.

-In May, the current list of categories of the OSC was added to sandbox of the National Science Digital Library Metadata Registry.

Categories with second levels in development:
-Art
-Biography & Autobiography
-Design
-Fiction
-History
-Performing Arts
-Religion
-Science

After working on the project for a year, we have the following recommendations:
-The project needs a steering committee structure for leadership. The
project is too large in scope for one or two librarians to manage
without other leadership.

-More involvement and leadership from public librarians! They know
the intended audience of the OSC best.

Intern at LibraryThing!

2009-06-10T17:52:00.004-04:00

Not sure what to do with your summer? I just posted this to a few local lists—librarians, design people, etc. I thought I'd post it here too.

LibraryThing.com, the innovative social site for book lovers wants an intern.

We can think of four possible "types" for whom we could create a nifty internship. We're only looking to get one intern, though.

"Weird Library Science" (MLS students)
"Web 2.0 Programming" (computer students)
"Web 2.0 Marketing" (anyone)
"Web 2.0 Design" (design students)

We offer:

*Minimum wage, probably
*Full- or part-time
*Cool, anarchic work environment (4 people in Portland, 6 elsewhere)

We'd love to get someone in who could help us, but the focus will be on learning from us, and doing interesting, open-ended and intellectually stimulating projects.

We'd rather get someone local (Portland, Maine), but if you really want to do something remote, and have a strong idea what you could do with us, we'd love to hear from you.

About LibraryThing:

LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com) is a social networking and social cataloging site for book lovers. Over 700,000 members have used the site to catalog over 40 million books--and created a whole new way of relating to books and to book people.

Contact: Tim Spalding, Founder (tim@librarything.com)

Ann Arbor's Shaman Drum closing

2009-06-10T12:56:00.003-04:00

Ann Arbor's legendary Shaman Drum Bookshop (website, LibraryThing Local) just announced they are closing after 29 years—and I'm devastated. They were my refuge in graduate school, and one of my favorite indies.

Links: Ann Arbor Chronicle, LA Times, Galleycat, Shaman Drum Announcement

New developments on the FRBR front

2009-06-09T16:41:00.005-04:00

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records have changed direction.

Hat-tip: Karen Coyle.

Category Feature Added to LTFL Reviews

2009-06-09T10:12:00.000-04:00

We've added a new feature to the LibraryThing for Libraries Reviews Enhancement: the ability to categorize reviews for the blog widget.

Thus far, library patrons have been able to write reviews and rate books in their library's catalog, add their reviews to their Facebook page and even create a widget that lets them show off their reviews on blogs and websites.

Now, libraries can show off reviews written by their patrons for specific library programs. Patrons and librarians can add categories to a review. The library can then create blog widgets with said categories – keep track of reviews for the Summer Reading Program, One Book, One City and book discussion groups.

This should be helpful all year round, but the inspiration for the feature came from a librarian's request to manage the reviews children were going to be writing for the summer reading program at their library. They wanted some way to display the reviews separately from the rest of the reviews coming in.

Anyone who's bought the Reviews Enhancement can use this feature starting immediately. Read here for instructions how to add and use it.

If you'd like more information about LTFL, and the enhancements that can take your OPAC from Library 1.0 to Library 2.0 overnight, fill out the interest form on the LTFL page.

The Reviews Enhancement isn't available for all OPACs – currently, it supports Horizon, iBistro, iLink, eLibrary, Webvoyage, Voyager 7, WebPac, WebPac Pro and Koha. More are coming soon!

LTFL Reviews: you stand 300,000 deep

2009-06-08T16:38:00.001-04:00

At the end of May, we reached 300,000 reviews vetted and available for LibraryThing for Libraries!

We'd previously been bragging about having 250,000 reviews, so here's my core sample: at the beginning of April, we had 24 reviews for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Now, we have 74. Of course, popular books will get more reviews, but trust me – we also cover the long, long tail of library collections.

The LTFL Reviews Enhancement is currently available for Horizon, iBistro, Webvoyage, Voyager 7, Koha, WebPac and WebPac Pro. The LTFL Catalog Enhancements are available for practically every OPAC. Contact us for more info.

How to start a dance party

2009-06-06T16:00:00.002-04:00

A good illustration for social efforts of every kind.

Hat-tip: Ze Frank, David Weinberger

New Kindle model released

2009-05-21T11:49:00.001-04:00

Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | More Video Clips

Non est potestas: OCLC Policy withdrawn

2009-05-21T11:25:00.005-04:00

Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei / There is no power on earth that compares with it (frontispiece to Hobbes' Leviathan)

The OCLC Review Board finally put OCLC's Policy to bed. In a short speech to the OCLC Members Council, board chair Jennifer Younger, affirmed "that a policy is needed, but not this policy." After the drubbing they got from the ICOLC and ARL—neither of which took into consideration OCLC's recent push into the software market—you can be sure OCLC will take its board's advice.

While the result was the right one, and I'm sure the members are good, conscientious librarians, I'm not going to echo others' praise about their decision. The writing was on the wall. If they had pushed forward, OCLC would have met even more hostility than it already engendered. The speech itself, like their "push poll" survey, show where the OCLC Review Board's sympathies lie. I don't think you could read the ICOLC or ARL reports against it and conclude OCLC "gets" it. It was, as one of my email correspondents put it "all about protecting WorldCat, identifying 'threats,' and 'appropriate use by members.'"

I think one of Dr. Younger's phrases nicely encapsulates the flaw in OCLC's approach, namely "we must revisit the Social Contract between OCLC and its members." I'd like to go into the phrase a little deeper, not without some fun-poking.

The Social Contract. The phrase "social contract" is an interesting one. The idea also appeared in the the ARL report*—and may well go have been used before. As everyone knows, it's a key concept in political theory (hence the Hobbes' frontispiece above) as the thing that, some believe, makes government power legitimate.

Why, therefore, does a cooperative need to express itself in terms of state-formation, rather than a voluntary cooperative? Why does OCLC want to cast itself as a government?

Sitting in OCLC's Brobdingnagian Dublin, OH headquarters, with thousands of OCLC workers shuttling about like so many ministry secretaries, and an interior hall bedecked with flags like the United Nations, it must be easy to think of OCLC as a sort of "government of libraries."**

Architectural criticism aside, OCLC's answer might be that, unlike cooperatives, a government gets to enforce its will more broadly. If you run afoul of a cooperative, the mutual consent that bound you to the cooperative is withdrawn, and you leave or they kick you out. But if you break the rules of a state, they put you in prison, whether you consent or not. Indeed, while philosophers have sometimes proposed a formal ceremony of consent, states act on non-consenting members all the time. Anarchists go to prison too (indeed, they tend to go to prison for being anarchists). This model, therefore, fits in better with OCLC's plan to bind former members and non-members use of library data. As a cooperative, OCLC is a purely member institution. With a "social contract," OCLC get to dictate more like a state.***

If the idea of OCLC-as-state is accepted, however, there's a gap between the ARL report's idea of a "mutual social contract"—a social contract between citizen equals—and Younger's description of the "Social Contract between OCLC and its members." The latter is a nice description of the more antique view of a contract between citizens and their sovereign. Even if libraries accept a government over them, I suspect they would be more comfortable with the more modern view of a contract between equals.

Nullum timeret? As libraries consider the matter, one factor can be put to rest: Fear.

Writing for the Next Generation Catalog for Libraries list, Karen Coyle speculated that libraries were responding to OCLC through organizations like ARL and ICOLC, out of a "combination of 'strength in numbers' and 'safety in numbers.'"

"I've seen a remarkable tendency of libraries to not want to confront OCLC. Remember that the proposed policy had penalties for mis-use of records, and severe ones at that (loss of rights to use OCLC records altogether). There is an intimidation factor involved. Agreed, as a member organization the members should not be afraid, but I think they are."

That fear should be much diminished. Members spoke up, and OCLC backed down again and again (by my count they postponed, revised, revised, revised, delayed for revision and now shelved). Libraries—and, quite importantly, lots of people who merely love libraries—rose up and forced OCLC to back down.

The frontispiece to Hobbes' Leviathan, shown above, quotes the Vulgate of the first clause of Job 41:33, non est super terram potestas quae conparetur ei ("There is no power on earth that compares to him."). No doubt Hobbes or anyway his cover-designer felt this a good description of the legitimate sovereign.

But for our purposes, the second clause is particularly apt, qui factus est ut nullum timeret, "There is no power on earth that compares to him, who was made to fear nothing." Job thought that whales were fearless.

Well, OCLC, you've met the architeuthis. And he is all of us.

See also:

*"In the eyes of the community, the guidelines expressed a mutual social contract, and the new Policy represents an authoritarian, unilaterally imposed legal restriction."
**The trees growing inside are also a nice touch. The Assyrian throne room just had a carving of a tree, and the White Tree of Gondor was outside. ;)
***Similarly, nobody minds if you belong to two cooperatives. But states tend to be jealous about allegiance. AS ICOLC wrote, libraries are involved in a "complex set of relationships," of which, "OCLC is one vital component among many that libraries will use." That's not really a "social contract" idea.

Photo by Flickr user OZinOH.

OCLC Policy, Good night

2009-05-12T22:18:00.001-04:00

The International Coalition of Library Consortia, a very loose but extremely large group of library consortia, just released a Statement on the Proposed OCLC Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records.

For a while there it looked like OCLC was going to succeed in locking down the world's library data, converting a wonderful sharing and coordination tool into an unbreakable data monopoly. But, together with OCLC's recent, revealing decision to enter the library systems market, the ICOLC statement effectively ends that possibility. OCLC isn't getting its new Policy, or anything like it.* Good night, OCLC Policy.

The details are worth a look. The ICOLC's statement was short, signing onto the "substantial and broad" concerns highlighted by the Association of Research Libraries. It goes on to add three concerns, two of which address the risk to innovation—a topic the ARL report barely touched on:

The proposed policy appears to freeze OCLC’s role in the library community based on historical and current relationships. We share the concern, voiced by many, that the policy hinders rather than encourages innovation, and we urge the Review Board to carefully examine this issue. It is unclear that the policy has been constructed with a focus on an evolving role of OCLC in enhancing the missions of an international library community with diverse and complex interests.
The scope of the proposed policy goes well beyond any concerns about inappropriate commercial exploitation of WorldCat records. It applies as well to non-commercial uses. ICOLC member consortia are member-created, member-driven innovation agents. Our initiatives are generally non-commercial and undertaken with member approval based on member needs. Any OCLC record use policy should account for the rich and diverse innovation that takes place through many consortia.
The proposed policy is legally murky. There is no mechanism for negotiation of terms and conditions nor is it clear what constitutes acceptance by member libraries. A new policy must address these problems.

As significant as the content was the list of signatories. Lyrasis, the former Palinet and Solinet, includes over 2,500 members. With "regional base and national scope" (their words), and about to merge with Nelinet, bringing their members to 4,500, Lyrasis is a major player. They're no longer just a "regional service provider" for OCLC, and can be expected to collaborate or compete with OCLC as its members' interests lead. They were joined by many of the big regional and state networks out there—MINITEX, NERL, the Florida Center for Library Automation, the Washington Research Library Consortium, the Michigan Library Consortium, WiLS, four Canadian consortia and both the Swedish and Finnish national libraries. Some of the signatories ought to have been sympathetic. Orbis Cascade, a source of much original cataloging, is also an important OCLC partner in developing consortial software. In Ohio, OCLC's home state, OhioLINK, OHIONET and INFOhio all signed. Other members will add their names to the list as they affirm it.

The Next Step. It's time now for the library world to step back and consider what, if anything, they want to do about restricting library data in a fast-moving, digital world. Some, including some who've deplored OCLC's process and the policy, want restrictions on how library data is distributed and used. Once monopoly and rapid, coerced adoption are off the table, that's a debate worth having, and one with arguments on both sides.

From my perspective, restrictions on the use and transfer of cataloging data—which is not usually copyrightable and is most frequently created by bodies responsible to the public good—is legally dubious and ethically stingy.

Instead, libraries should embrace "radical openness," a commitment to sharing what they know freely, something that looks less radical in light of the library's historic dedication to the free exchange of information. Selling other people's library records isn't a real threat, but, if it were, the answer would be more openness, not less. When you sell tickets, you get scalpers. But nobody makes money selling passes to Central Park. (A few people make money walking dogs around it. Most just enjoy the free grass and sunshine.) And in a world that's looking less and less friendly to the long-term success of libraries, an unwavering commitment to sharing and openness may well be libraries' saving grace.

So, three cheers to ICOLC for speaking up on this issue. Now, librarians and library programmers, let's get back to work. Let's earn our freedom.

Artwork: "Flickr is Freedom." Creative Commons, Attribution, by Timtak.

*I note with some interest that Edward Corrado, whose OCLC posts have been very perceptive, isn't quite as excited about this as I am. Where he wishes the statement was "worded a little stronger" I take great solace in phrases like "The proposed policy appears to freeze OCLC’s role in the library community based on historical and current relationships." I'm hoping some others weigh in. The library world is, I think, somewhat exhausted by the whole OCLC Policy affair, and now that the organizations are weighing in strongly and negatively, the bloggers and newslist-ers who raised the initial questions—and were excoriated for it—may no longer be as necessary.

Improved support for Koha

2009-04-29T14:10:00.002-04:00

Setting up LibraryThing for Libraries in Koha is now a only couple of clicks away!

The 3.2 version of Koha (which isn't out yet) will include the improved integration for LTFL. If you are using Koha without a host, and run on the bleeding edge, you can try it now via Git.

What this does is enable and disable LTFL through the Koha Enhanced Content system preference page. Simply enter your LTFL account number (found on your LibraryThing for Libraries Account page), decide where you'd like LTFL content to display (in tabs or under other bibliographic details) and enable it. No need to edit Koha templates.

The work to make this possible was initiated by me and extended and improved by Chris Hyde of East Brunswick Public Library. Thanks, Chris!

Podcast 3 is over there

2009-04-28T21:25:00.002-04:00

Check out the main blog for Podcast Number 3 ("Murder! Politics! Books!"), a delightful romp through the Legacy Library project with its coordinator, Jeremy Dibbell.

The conversation touches on LibraryThing's contribution to 18th century American history scholarship—Jeremy's discovery, with Monticello's Endrina Tay, of the library of George Wythe, a prominent Virginian and signer of the Declaration of Independence, reconstructed from an untitled book list in the Thomas Jefferson papers.

Check it out here

OCLC news reactions

2009-04-24T17:24:00.006-04:00

This post follows on The OCLC End Game, posted early this morning.

Library Journal's Josh Hadro did an excellent follow-up article. Besides citing this blog post, Hadro got responses from Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris on OCLC's tenuous non-profit status—I'll have another post about that soon—and a number of bloggers. Iris Jastram/Pegasus Librarian's thoughts deserve quotation:

"I'm pleased that this is yet another competitor against the current lumbering giants in the ILS market, and I like the idea that (if I understand correctly) this will add a hosted option to the ILS market. ... On the other hand, this means that that pesky new policy on the transfer and use of OCLC records really wasn't just about protecting a bunch of member-produced data after all. There were bigger plans afoot, and these plans involved leaning even farther toward the vendor model rather than the service model. And if OCLC is a vendor rather than a service, that new policy feels even more like a land-grab rather than an effort to protect member investments."

Ms. Jastram's misgivings are comforting to me, at least, as her previous thoughts on the OCLC Policy were more mixed. Ultimately, the fate of OCLC's Policy will be decided by the people in the middle—the fair-minded people, not the ones who equate OCLC with the Matrix, The Empire or the All Your Bases villain.*

The Smithsonian Libraries on the OCLC Policy. I missed this, but on April 2 the official blog of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries weighed in on the OCLC Policy and the ACRL/ARL response (PDF), "support[ing] the recommendations" emphasizing a number of points. Among these were:

"The policy should recognize and affirm traditional library values of cooperative cataloging and shared bibliographic information without any claim of ownership of the bibliographic records."
"OCLC’s new policy should recognize, and not be in conflict with, existing legal obligations or requirements that may apply to some OCLC member libraries (such as federal libraries)."

It's great to see a federal library making such a public statement. Having been passed by in the OCLC Policy discussion—Federal librarians have told me they were amazed OCLC thought it could unilaterally change licensing terms with government entities—and not included on the ARL/ACRL board either, at least one is lending its voice to the criticism. Hooray for them. James Smithson, who left his estate for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge"—and to a country he had never even visited!—would, I think, be proud.

*Chris Bourg left a comment to the effect that the AYBABTU reference was purely humorous, and she does not consider OCLC a villain, even if she thinks I've got a good argument. Now, can anyone think of a way to tape Jay Jordan saying "You have no chance to succeed make your time"? I'm thinking we could sky write it over OCLC headquarters in Dublin, OH and secretly film OCLC employees puzzling it out. Ideally, though, he'd need to wear the bionic monocle.

I will never run out of interesting Flickr chess images. This one's by Shyald, from a series.

The OCLC End Game

2009-04-24T02:06:00.009-04:00

Two years ago I predicted what OCLC, the library-data organization, was after with it's WorldCat Local pilot program—"They're trying to convert a data licensing monopoly into a services monopoly." To illustrate, I changed the OCLC logo to the Death Star.

I was hardly alone in this speculation. But this concern was soon overtaken as OCLC brought forth it's Revised Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records. The Policy, which turned a de facto data monopoly into a legally enforceable one, became a focus of intense debate in the library world. On the one side just about every library blogger with a keyboard, and eventually a review board at the ACRL/ARL, raised questions about the idea of anyone "owning" records meant for sharing and most frequently produced by government entities. On the other side, OCLC's defenders (in truth, mostly employees), talked of OCLC's "curation" of community content, of "protecting members' investment," of the "best interest of libraries," "OCLC's public purposes" and of WorldCat.com's role as an essential "switching mechanism" to local catalog (references: 1, 2, 3).

Yesterday, OCLC unveiled the end game that brings everything together. As reported by Marshall Breeding in Library Journal:

"This new project, which OCLC calls "the first Web-scale, cooperative library management service," will ultimately bring into WorldCat Local the full complement of functions traditionally performed by a locally installed integrated library system (ILS)."

The new service will be "free" to (paying) WorldCat First Search customers.

The move to "web scale" (OCLC-speak for "web") catalogs was an inevitable one, and is a good one. It's silly to have every library in the country running their own racks of servers. The economics of server architecture, equipment and systems administration make a single, hosted solution economically superior. It makes particular sense for OCLC. With a large percentage of world libraries' data sitting in servers for copy-cataloging purposes, a locally branded and faceted web-app. catalog was the next logical step.

The move casts new light on its Policy defenses. OCLC isn't "curating" library records; it's leveraging them to enter a new market. It wasn't "protecting members' investment," it was investing members' money, intended to support OCLC's core mission, to build a new service. WorldCat isn't a "switching mechanism" to local catalogs. It will replace them.

I'd love to follow them. I'd love to make a large-scale hosted library catalog. I think LibraryThing could do a lot better. OCLC is full of smart people, but it develops slowly and has shown singular inability to produce social features that anyone would want to use. I think Talis, AquaBrowser, LibLime and Equinox could do better too. And I think, if library programmers got together, they could make truly open community-run service—something others, like LibraryThing, could provide plug-ins for.

We'd all love to try, but we aren't allowed. According to the Policy, you can't build the sort of truly "web scale" database that would make such a project economically viable. Anything that replicates the "function, purpose and/or size" of WorldCat is not "Reasonable Use." Any library participating in such a venture would lose its right to OCLC-derived records, something that would literally shutter most public and all academic libraries in the country. When it comes to large-scale online catalogs, there can be no competing with OCLC.

Let me be clear: I have no problem with OCLC developing software. They do good work. I for one think WorldCat/WorldCat Local is a better product than most server-based OPACs.

But, now more than ever, OCLC must end its attempts to restrict and monopolize library data. It was ugly and unfair for OCLC to claim ownership over what is largely public data. It is obscene to leverage that data monopoly into a software monopoly.

Chess images from Flick users malias and furryscaly. Chess outside makes me think of the Deus' song Slow. What is it with Europeans and outdoor chess sets anyway?