A debate is carrying on in the undercurrents of the academic Web, pitting those who defend libraries’ core mission of open access against the membership organization that collects and operates a massive online catalog on which many of them rely.
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In an attempt to protect WorldCat and the resources needed to keep it running, while making it sufficiently accessible to its members, OCLC announced a policy change that would have placed a notice in each record to the effect that it is governed by the WorldCat terms contained in an accompanying Web address — terms that could presumably change over time. Libraries would also be encouraged to add the text to a specific field within each of their own records that originated from WorldCat.
Some bloggers interpreted the change as a power grab, an attempt to block libraries from using records for purposes that could conflict with OCLC’s goals. For example, some libraries are considering using their records to generate revenue to support their own growing operations, and that could fall into OCLC’s “commercial use” prohibition. Print-on-demand services, which make use of WorldCat records, could be affected; so could planned “discovery” interfaces that span dozens of libraries.
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