Print? Dead?

AJ Million — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 04:38:25 +0000

Roy Tennant, the Senior Program Manager for OCLC Programs and Research, wrote an article that as someone interested in digital libraries, and as someone who appreciates the Neitzsche derived reference, just… plain… owns! Yes, that’s right. I referred to an article from the Library Journal as “owning.”

Spurred on by a book titled “Print is Dead,” Tennant makes the point that print dosen’t seem to be going anywhere. Instead he notes that we are moving to a mixed media environment. I’ve has suspicions as much for a while, but the fact that Jeff Gomez’s book was printed in PRINT seems to make the title either one of two things: 1. suspect (or) 2. an obvious attention grabber.

The full post can be found at here.

Hey, OCLC! It’s not 1980 anymore!

AJ Million — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 06:41:58 +0000

I was doing some sleuthing on Twitter the other day and a friend posted an excellent article from the Guardian. Basically, the article raises the question, “why can’t you use a search engine to find if a local library has a book?” The answer has to do with OCLC’s protectionist policies and quotes:

(T)here is an alternative that few people seem aware of: Worldcat (worldcat.org), which offers web access to the largest repository of bibliographic data in the world – from the 40-year-old Ohio-based non-profit Online Computer Library Center (oclc.org). But Worldcat suffers from the same problem on a larger scale. OCLC shares only 3m of its 125m records with Google Books; none of them show up in an ordinary search. You might expect forward-thinking libraries to put their databases online, to encourage people through their doors. But they can’t. Even though they created the data, pay to have records added to the database and pay to download them, they can’t.

What really caught my attention was:

“The library world is set up on this model where the library is a physical building and has a number of books and serves a geographical community,” says Swartz. “Our model is find the book you’re interested in and give you the metadata – and then find the best way to get it to you.”

It should be pretty obvious as to what my opinion is (look at the name of this blog), but I’m curious… what does everyone else think? Is OCLC protecting us? Or should the walls come tumbling down? On one hand all 125 million of OCLC’s records are community contributed. On the other, however there’s the fact that Google could clean our clock if we didn’t band together.

Library Without Walls » OCLC

Print? Dead?

Hey, OCLC! It’s not 1980 anymore!