Caveat Lector

I find myself pondering the quandary OCLC and libraries are enmeshed in. If you haven’t heard—and it seems a great many librarians haven’t—OCLC is trying to unveil a new agreement regarding WorldCat records uploaded by libraries. For my money, the best analysis is coming from Jonathan Rochkind. As best I can tell, his assessment of the copyright situation is right on the mark, his guesses about motives and means ring true to me, and his suggested solutions are workable.

The angle from which I approach this is, as usual, my Greg Downey–influenced labor consciousness. (I tell people at SLIS that Greg Downey will change the way they think about the profession. They don’t believe me. They should.) Where is the labor coming from, where do the results of that labor go and why, and of course cui bono?

What keeps sticking in my craw is that libraries never said “Let’s get together and form a consortium!” They said “Let’s get together and share cataloguing records.” A consortium used to be necessary to do that, which was the genesis of OCLC. In my estimation, that necessity is waning; ubiquitous networking can do the job just as well or better. OCLC’s “we gotta eat” attitude is not flying because they are overestimating their contribution to the whole and (crucially) misidentifying the goal of the contributed labor.

(Any resemblance to the scholarly journal industry is left as an exercise for the reader. Likewise any similarity between the OCLC landgrab and the Thomson-Reuters lawsuit against Zotero. Okay, I’ll offer a hint on that last one: both rely on licensing arrangements only because they haven’t a copyright leg to stand on and they know it.)

Labor figures into this from another angle, as well. It’s no secret that OCLC has been assembling a considerable portfolio of talent—not coincidentally, pleasantly and affably outspoken talent—in its research division. There’s a potential problem with outspoken talent, though; it tends to be opinionated, not to mention idealistic. When its employer violates its ideals, outspoken talent has been known to start in horror and leave.

I have a feeling this OCLC landgrab isn’t sitting real well with some of OCLC’s talent. It’s no more than a feeling; I have no ears on the inside. I don’t know how much that talent is expressing itself internally, either. Possibly not much; American work culture is such that outspoken talent with a lick of sense points its expression outward rather than inward. Still, those folks are outspoken. How long will they remain silent? And if they do, will their silence be the ultimate silence of departure?

And a third labor angle: Many classes of librarian labor can be safely ignored by mammoths like OCLC and ILS vendors. Reference librarians grumble a bit, but they don’t revolt, and they won’t badmouth you in public. Ditto cataloguers, who skulk about on AUTOCAT and otherwise say nothing much. There’s one class of librarian you don’t want to hack off, though, and that is…

… the hackers. As a class, they’re like me: public-facing, articulate, loud, obnoxious, and unashamed of any of it. They also control vital parts of library infrastructure, and influence decisions both toward and away from OCLC properties, meaning that they can call a boycott and make it stick. They also bathe in the waters of open source, open data, and sharing, making them far more like the initial labor pool of cataloguers that became OCLC than either OCLC or existing cataloguers are now.

They are OCLC’s competition. Not Open Library, not LibraryThing, not even LibLime and ‡biblios (though ‡biblios looks like a contender to me). Library hackers. Give them a room, a week, the Library of Congress record store plus whatever their institutions hand them, and lots of pizza and caffeine, and they’ll have built a new and better WorldCat. And don’t kid yourselves, OCLC, they want to.

OCLC’s landgrab takes a big library-hacker toy away—a toy they were in the process of turning into real tools and services. This is bad for libraries and librarians, unquestionably, but I’m completely convinced that OCLC cares far more about OCLC than about that. What I’m trying to get across here is that hacking off the hackers is bad for OCLC, too. Whatever else hackers are, they’re free labor from OCLC’s point of view. If OCLC gives them toys, they’ll urge their management to support OCLC, and they’ll build tools on OCLC properties (which, lest we forget, go far beyond their catalogue-record store) such that their libraries will break if OCLC isn’t supported.

That’s a much better position for OCLC than the landgrab leaves them in, I think.