So the big news in libraryland this week was the FRPAA bill—well, it should have been the FRPAA bill. But it wasn’t. It was the merger of OCLC and RLG.
I’d like to be thrilled about this. I’m not.
OCLC has lots of smart people. RLG has lots of smart people. The two together are likely to have—fewer smart people. Most mergers lead to pink slips. Even those that don’t inevitably lead to departures.
And frankly, if I were an RLG employee—and possibly even if I worked for OCLC right now—my résumé would be hitting the wires right this very minute. Why? Because nobody in either organization was told about the merger until it was all but a fait accompli. Look around the biblioblogosphere. You won’t find anybody who’s anything but shocked. (Lorcan hasn’t weighed in, probably wisely.) That’s not management behavior that I would be inclined to trust. Call me suspicious if you will.
Will the folks who leave stay with librarianship? Maybe, maybe not. Almost certainly we lose a few. Yay. This is me rejoicing. Yay, I said.
I also tend to worry about what happens when two organizations working on similar projects join. I think we’ve lost some diversity of approach with this merger; both OCLC and RLG were working on FRBRization projects, but from rather different angles. What now? “Oh, we’re doing that over here. Go do something else.” Trust me, if there’s one thing library research does not need, it’s less experimentation.
And then there’s the big kahuna—OCLC sells its R&D results. RLG is a membership organization, so that it can offer its R&D free to all comers. The floated merger proposal, as I read it, keeps RLG’s membership system intact—but I don’t trust the firewall between RLG and OCLC, not one bit. Of course OCLC will do its level best to monetize the cool stuff coming out of RLG. That’s their business model. I look forward to being charged out the wazoo for Trusted Digital Repository certification, unless NARA can put the brakes on things—and why would NARA care?
I would very much like to be wrong about all this. I should say that I don’t think anybody’s gone into it in bad faith, and I do believe that Lorcan Dempsey will do his level best with it. (And, hell, I haven’t heard anything bad about Velterop at Springer, so maybe I’m wrong about this too.) But I see more bad than good in this for libraries; I truly do.
