Everybody's Libraries

In my previous two posts, I discussed how open library metadata is becoming increasingly important for the future of library content, and how OCLC’s new catalog policy works against it. By asserting proprietary rights over the records in WorldCat, OCLC risks relegating libraries’ painstaking descriptions of their resources to the sidelines of Web-based innovation and aggregation. In the long term, this threatens to marginalize libraries, and their missions.

In this last post of the series, I suggest responses that may improve the situation. OCLC’s new policy won’t go into effect until February, and it’s evolved since it first hit the Net a few weeks ago. Commenting on the policy, OCLC vice-president Karen Calhoun has said

We believe that libraries, the wider library-archives-museum community, and those they serve will benefit from the updated policy without placing our shared investment in WorldCat at peril.

I’ll take her word that OCLC believes that they’re acting in the best interests of the members of the WorldCat cooperative. I just don’t think they actually are acting in libraries’ best interests in their current proposal. But ultimately the libraries themselves are the most appropriate ones to determine that, not I, or OCLC’s officials. So my first suggestion is:

Get informed, and speak up. There’s been a lot of discussion about OCLC’s new policy, and you can find pointers to much of the public online debate here. So far, I’ve mostly just seen OCLC officials defending the policy, and various individuals inside and outside libraries criticizing it. The libraries in the WorldCat cooperative need to make their voices heard as well. Whether they’re for or against the policy, they should have a say on the fate of the metadata corpus they’ve worked to support and populate.

OCLC’s new policy doesn’t just affect traditional library catalog applications. The MARC records OCLC manages can hold lots of important additional information about library materials, including digitizations, copyright, and preservation. I’ve advocated cooperative information sharing in these areas (and participated in planning discussions for some of them), and I’ve been pleased to see OCLC’s leadership in these areas. I don’t want to see these initiatives held back by restrictive sharing policies attached to their records.

Know (and assert) your rights. The main legal justifications for restricting the reuse and sharing of catalog records are copyright law and contract law. Contract law may sometimes override rights that one would normally have under copyright (such as fair use and public domain), but generally requires some sort of specific agreement between parties. If you’re working with OCLC, you might want to make sure you don’t sign away rights you might otherwise have to your own cataloging, or to that of other libraries. I’m not a lawyer, and I can’t give you advice on how best to do this, but adding explicit statements of your rights, and modifying or striking out questionable concessions in OCLC contracts, might be in order.

It’s worth noting that OCLC’s policy, in its current draft, specifically says that it does not restrict simply associating an OCLC control number with an otherwise independent record, or a library reusing and redistributing WorldCat records marked as its own original cataloging. Libraries may want to explicitly affirm these prerogatives. (And third parties can freely attach OCLC numbers to their own records, and could make arrangements with libraries that have done original cataloging to free their records.)

The extent to which copyright can apply to catalog records is not a settled matter, to my knowledge, but the US Supreme Court’s Feist decision makes it clear that, under US law, simply compiling facts without “requisite originality” is not sufficient for copyright. It follows straightforwardly, in my opinion, that basic factual citation information in a catalog record (such as title, author, and edition) and other objective facts (such as page counts and physical dimensions) are no more copyrightable than the names, addresses and telephone numbers in the Feist telephone directory case were. In addition, works originally created by federal government agencies (like the Library of Congress) are not subject to US copyright. In other countries, though, copyright or other restrictions might apply to objective facts; and US copyright might apply to more subjective parts of a catalog record (like prose descriptions or subject analysis). If you want to remove doubt about the reusability of your metadata, and prevent it from being made proprietary, I suggest:

Attach a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license to your records. (Update: But see the discussion in the comments below about alternatives, and pros and cons of different approaches, before deciding to go this route. – JMO)  As I’ve noted previously, the Attribution-ShareAlike license allows any sort of reuse of a record, but requires that its source be credited, and that any copies or derivatives of the record remain shareable. Creative Commons licenses specifically reaffirm all the normal rights that users have under copyright law, so it should be safe to add them even to records that might be public domain, without compromising their status. That’s the license I use for my Online Books Page records.

The license should cover the record itself, and records that derive from it. It should not apply to the entire contents of any database that contains the record (as some have suggested). A database-wide viral license has both philosophical and practical problems. (There are lots of reasons why I might want to have an ILS or union catalog that contains both proprietary and Share-Alike records. For instance, I might have various electronic collections for which I’ve previously bought proprietary records, completely independent from my open records.)

OCLC can use Attribution-ShareAlike records in WorldCat and in any of the services they sell, just as any other commercial or noncommercial organization can. (They could also include them alongside proprietary records.) But they can’t add their own restrictions to the records — which I’ve noted previously are incompatible with ShareAlike — without violating the Creative Commons terms, or implicitly admitting that the record is public domain. Thus, it’s possible to pre-emptively “inoculate” records contributed to WorldCat, or to any other aggregation that includes the records, against their being made proprietary.

OCLC could decide to refuse records with Attribution-ShareAlike licenses. But they’d have to go out of their way to do this, and they’d be acting against the stated wishes of the contributor. I think it’s worth seeing if they’d push back like this. If they did, it’d be worth bringing to the public’s attention, and may also be worth distributing the records outside of OCLC. Which brings me to my last suggestion:

Consider alternative methods for sharing library metadata. Just as OCLC is not the creator of most of the library metadata in WorldCat, it is not the only possible coordinator of library metadata. A number of other organizations are also aggregating descriptions of library resources, some for specific applications, like Google’s Book Search, some for social networking businesses, like LibraryThing, some for preservation, like Hathi Trust, some for free-for-all sharing, like Open Library. Other data hubs may arise as well. (Indeed, an open WorldCat could remain a vital hub that enriches those other aggregations, and is in turn enriched from the information aggregated at the other hubs.) Libraries might contribute records to multiple aggregators.

It’s important to remember that any broad-based data cooperative is not likely to completely satisfy all its members. An alternative to OCLC will not necessarily be more open, unless its members hold it to that standard. Reliability, quality control, and seamless interaction are not easy to provide, and participants in alternative networks will have to put time and effort into getting them right.

New cataloging cooperatives could also provide places to experiment with better representations and workflows for library metadata. Implementors need to be careful about getting sidetracked here; past experiences with RDA and other proposed changes to cataloging infrastructure show that new initiatives can be argued over for years without much progress. But if new union catalogs are compatible with existing catalog systems (such as by providing and accepting standard MARC records), and support efficient workflows, they can potentially represent metadata internally in new structures that might be more informative and easier to maintain. This could improve library cooperation and sharing across the board (and maybe improve WorldCat itself in the process).

This ends my discussion, at least for now, of OCLC’s new policy and its conflict with open library metadata. I hope it’s helped inform and advise readers about the debate, and the issues at stake. And I hope it will help readers determine where they stand, and how they should respond.

As I mentioned in my last post, OCLC’s new policy for the use of catalog records from WorldCat (a policy now in at least its third revision) has generated substantial controversy, particularly among library bloggers.

The controversy focuses on statements that prohibit reuse (without express OCLC approval) of records contributed to WorldCat, unless the use is both “noncommercial” and “reasonable”. What does “reasonable” mean here? OCLC’s policy statement (as of November 20) specifically excludes any use that

a. discourages the contribution of bibliographic and holdings data to WorldCat, thus
damaging OCLC Members’ investment in WorldCat, and/or

b. substantially replicates the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat

But OCLC makes it clear that this is not an exhaustive list, and that “OCLC has the sole discretion to determine whether any Use and/or Transfer of WorldCat Records complies with this policy”. OCLC has stated in its FAQ that starting in February, it will add notices to every record downloaded from WorldCat stating that use of the record is subject to OCLC’s new usage policy.

In other words, OCLC claims the right to decide whether any application using WorldCat-deposited catalog data should be allowed to exist.

OCLC admits that their policy is intended to protect their revenue, and claims that they are acting to protect its subscriber libraries. But as plenty of other commenters have pointed out, the policy puts a big OCLC-sized bottleneck in the way of innovative use and reuse of library metadata. This further promotes the marginalization of library resources, which could easily hurt those same subscriber libraries. Ultimately, I think this policy is self-defeating even for OCLC itself, because the policy itself “discourages the contribution of… data to WorldCat”. At least it does for anyone who sees open library metadata as important, and doesn’t want confusion or licensing fights to erupt when OCLC’s terms of use are inserted into the records they contribute.

OCLC Vice President Karen Calhoun likened the new OCLC policy to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licenses, but it’s incompatible in both letter and spirit with that license, and with any other ShareAlike license. The Creative Commons license allows enhancement, adaptation and reuse for any “function, purpose, or size”. (At least in the noncommercial domain. If, as I recommend, the NonCommercial aspect is not used, then both commercial and noncommercial applications– including any that OCLC sells– can draw on and enhance the content.) The terms are straightforward, and not subject to later reinterpretation or revocation if the grantor decides that their business is threatened. Users do not have to apply for permission to innovate.

The ShareAlike aspect, furthermore, prohibits any downstream organization from trying to lock up or impose additional restrictions, such as OCLC’s, on what was given to them freely. Open data is kept open.

Opening WorldCat data might make OCLC a leaner organization that it is now; Microsoft and Elsevier show that quasi-monopolies can sustain bigger margins than most other businesses. But OCLC also sells lots of services on metadata that bring in money, and it employs smart people who have deep knowledge of library practices and needs, and who continue to bring out innovative and useful services. (To take just one example from OCLC’s many services, WorldCat Local could attract lots of subscription fees from libraries that no longer want to run their own ILS, if the service is well enough designed and run.) In the information technology world, companies like Red Hat and IBM do quite well selling services on free software, and I’m confident that folks at OCLC also have the expertise to sustain themselves with services on open data.

As Stefano Mazzocchi points out, OCLC’s new policy might buy them some time, but the Web isn’t going away, and the people (and companies) who might find library metadata useful aren’t going away either. OCLC is hardly the only organization that can create library metadata. (Indeed, they largely get it from their own subscribers.) But OCLC’s ShareAlike-incompatible license effectively draws a line in the sand: a catalog record can support the agenda of open library data, or support OCLC’s agenda, but not both.

If forced to take sides, the choice is clear to me: open library data is ultimately the best way to support libraries and their missions. If possible, though, I’d rather work with OCLC than work around them. In Part 3 of this series (coming soon now posted), I’ll suggest some possibly useful ways to respond between now and February, when OCLC’s new policy is scheduled to take effect.

(First of a series of 3 posts.  See also Part 2: Problems with OCLC’s catalog policy, and Part 3: How to respond?)

A new bibliographic record distribution policy from OCLC threatens to split the library community from the increasingly large and valuable data sharing resources and applications on the Web, if it doesn’t simply fracture the library community internally. In this post, I’ll try to explain the basic issues. I hope to follow this with specific critiques of OCLC’s policy, and suggestions of useful responses. (If you’d just like a concise overview of the controversy, this Inside Higher Ed article is a good place to start.)

Librarians often lament that people all too often bypass the well-written, informative resources collected by libraries in favor of material on the open Web. One reason for this practice is that Web content is widely harvested, indexed, and annotated by a variety of entities. Some are well-known, large-scale services like Google, Technorati, or Delicious. Some are smaller services that specialize in a particular niche. Each of these services reuses openly accessible data to make Web content easy to find, search, and annotate. Information about what’s in libraries (“metadata”, in library parlance) has also been compiled with great detail and effort, but it tends to be locked up behind individual libraries’ online public access catalogs (OPACs) that tend to be less usable, and less visible, than services like Google.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If you follow this blog, for instance, you’re aware of the DLF ILS Discovery Interfaces recommendation, which is meant to free library metadata from the constraints of the OPAC and make it available to a wide variety of discovery applications. And a growing number of Web services like Open Library, LibraryThing, WorldCat.org, and Google Book Search aggregate metadata from a variety of libraries and other knowledge sources. They open up interesting new ways for people to find, use, and annotate books and other knowledge sources. Bringing library resources into the light through services like these helps readers find the best information, and helps libraries fulfill their missions.

These services, as well as libraries themselves, rely on aggregating the metadata they need from a wide variety of sources. Creating catalog records for books is a laborious and painstaking process, one that would be too labor intensive for most libraries acting on their own. So librarians long ago agreed to partition the work, exchange their records, and enhance them jointly, though the use of shared cataloging and union catalogs that combined the different libraries’ records. Union catalogs were first devised well before the Web, when libraries mainly traded information just among themselves. Union catalog participants typically contribute their own catalog records, and pay a subscription fee for the right to retrieve and reuse records from the union catalog. One current union catalog, OCLC’s WorldCat, has absorbed other union catalogs over time and is currently much larger than any other of its kind. The WorldCat.org website gives free public access to some, but not all, of the information in the subscription-based WorldCat.

In effect, libraries are paying their staff to create catalog records, giving them to OCLC, and then paying to get them back. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re paying a reasonable price for a useful service, such as OCLC provides with its WorldCat service. But such arrangements can turn exploitative or obstructionist over time. We in libraries are all too aware of this when we see the invoices for the journals we subscribe to, where the articles are written and refereed for free by our faculty. The subscription fee in some cases can cost as much as a new car just for one year of a single journal. And the scholars who wrote the articles typically sign away their rights to get them published, and then can be surprised to discover that they are restricted from redistributing or reusing what they themselves wrote.

An alternative advocated by many library professionals (myself included) is open access, where intellectual content can be freely shared and reused. We have lots of arguments about how open access can lower costs, increase visibility, and promote the global spread of knowledge. The arguments are not just about economics and philanthropy, but about improving scholarship. For instance, when data is freely shared, it can be fruitfully be reused, repurposed, remixed, and reanalyzed in new scholarship and teaching. Yet, even while libraries have promoted open access, open access has not been the principal ways in which we have shared and distributed our own cataloging.

At Palinet’s future of cataloging forum I attended earlier this year, I heard folks in various parts of libraries start to speak up about opening up access to our own cataloging data. My own talk at that forum argued for opening access to catalog data, and recommended doing so via Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses. There were also OCLC staff at the same forum, and while they did not promise anything specific, I got the sense that they were planning on opening up access to their WorldCat records.

The new policy does clarify how individual researchers and libraries can reuse and repurpose WorldCat records in some useful ways. Unfortunately, it also explicitly asserts OCLC control over these records, in a way that threatens to dampen much of the sharing and independent collective action that can make our library metadata much more visible and useful. In a followup post, I’ll summarize the problems I see in the policy, and then suggest some things that we might do to help free our library metadata for the benefit of our users.