This is a story of a monster, an apprentice of a wizard, a cute little thing that grew and grew until it became out of control and betrayed its creator.
This is the story of a little-known organization called OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center), which is (no joke) trying to steal your library, and our, all libraries, to make money for themselves.
OCLC was founded in 1967 by Fred Kilgour, a pioneer librarian from Ohio. His initial idea was simple:
Instead of having every library in the country catalog books in isolation - painstakingly entering the title, author, and subject in the correct format over and over again - why not have people enter the cataloging information once, upload it to a central computer, and then let others make copies from there?
This project was named WorldCat, and it was a huge success. Today, it has approximately 50 million bibliographic records (translator's note: it now has over 270 million bibliographic records).
But the organization that owns and operates it, OCLC, is a different story. It started small - a small office in Ohio, with the cost of running the servers shared among a group of member libraries through membership fees.
Later, control of OCLC shifted from librarians and scholars to business people (with senior management coming from Deloitte Consulting).
They realized their monopoly position and, as the cost of running servers decreased, their prices gradually increased.
They would charge you a fee to add your records to WorldCat.
Then they would charge you again to access them.
And then they would charge you a series of additional fees and services.
And these fees were not cheap.
I have a friend who runs a small public library with about 5,000 cardholders, and he was asked to pay $5,400 to contribute his bibliographic records, $700 to access them, plus a series of "user support" and "new member implementation" fees - all far beyond what he could afford.
They used the cash flow generated from this to fund large-scale acquisitions of commercial companies and expand into other areas.
Their small office in Ohio has grown into a huge administrative building.
They bankrupted other library vendors with their power and influence, so they could sell the same products themselves.
And all along, they became more and more closed off, even secretive.
Because they didn't want to give up this cash cow, OCLC resisted putting library bibliographic records on the internet for a long time, delaying it again and again.
It wasn't until a few years ago that they finally created a website for WorldCat, but even then, they tried to keep it secret:
- Only Google and Yahoo were allowed to see a few pages, and even they could only access two out of 110 million pages, and only under strict licensing agreements.
In an age when people are turning to Google instead of libraries for research, this is crazy - it doesn't even give library books a chance to appear in the search engine world, further marginalizing libraries.
It's all bad, but it's still tolerable.
At least people can build alternatives to OCLC.
That's what I and others have been doing - Open Library provides free data with over 20 million bibliographic records that anyone can browse, download, contribute to, and reuse completely for free.
Of course, OCLC is not happy about this.
They have been trying to kill it from the beginning - threatening its funders with lawsuits, insulting it in the media, and pressuring their member libraries to refuse to cooperate. (Note again the alienation of this relationship: an organization created to help libraries is now so powerful that it can force libraries to do its bidding.)
But recently, they have taken another step forward.
They are not satisfied with controlling the world's largest source of book information; they want to take over all the smaller sources of information as well.
They now require every library that uses WorldCat to transfer control of all their bibliographic records to OCLC.
They require libraries to attach OCLC's terms of use to every bibliographic record.
They want to monopolize every library.
And it's not just Open Library that is at risk - Library Thing, Zotero, and even some new features being developed for Wikipedia are all threatened.
Basically, anything that uses book information will be a victim of this unprecedented monopoly.
It's terrifying to think about.
Fortunately, the new regulations have not yet taken effect, so it's not too late to stop them. But we need your help. Please spread the word about this disaster and share this blog post. Please sign our petition demanding that they stop.
Also, if you are a librarian or work in a library, there is more you can do.
First, you can share your library's bibliographic records now, before the new policy takes effect. Second, you can grant a unique license to the bibliographic records you have contributed to OCLC and insist that the entire bibliographic data be available under open terms. Third, you can use your OCLC membership to pressure the organization to listen to the libraries' opinions instead of dictating to them.
If you are interested in helping, please email me ([email protected]). Together, we can stop this.
Afterword:#
This article was originally published on Aaron Swartz's personal blog http://www.aaronsw.com and was later deleted.It is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20090208104305/http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/574
Thanks to the efforts of various parties, OCLC abandoned its new terms in 2009.
For further developments and a specific timeline, please refer to https://wiki.code4lib.org/OCLC_Policy_Change.
Although Aaron's Open Library has pushed OCLC to be more open, the number of records open to the public is still less than 10% of what they have.