Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall | Peer to Peer Review
Barbara Fister wonders how long weâll let our organizations fence us in.
Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 03/11/2010
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Making the shift from traditional market-based forms of sharing information to open access will take more than tinkering at the edges. It means rethinking how we allocate our resources and how we construct a culture of sharing, one that doesn’t depend on artificially limited access. It also will mean breaking the grip of our own organizations when they begin to defend themselves against alternatives.
Yes, I’m looking at you, OCLC.
This issue came into sharp focus as I was reading a commentary published in Nature on chemistry’s resistance to open science. Habits that physicists have practiced for decades are resisted by chemists, and that resistance arises out of the ways chemists approach information. Exchanging preprints has never been as common among chemists as it is in other science disciplines. Chemists tend to be wary of sharing unfinished research because, until it has been rigorously tested, it may blow up in your face—or it might give a competitor a leg up.
Chemists also respect the traditions of their field, where research findings have been systematically collected and organized for more than a century. Chemists were ahead of other scientists in creating deep databases of information and moving them online, and they are now understandably leery of undermining the systems that they have developed even as new possibilities, made possible through sharing information freely, beckon.
Bibliographic out-of-control
They also seem to have no control over Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), the division of the American Chemical Society that produces "the most authoritative and comprehensive source of chemical information." At least, when I ask chemists why their society charges so much for SciFinder Scholar and is so stingy with concurrent seats, they throw up their hands. "That's CAS," they say. "They don’t listen to us."
No doubt that's partly because the revenue stream that CAS products produce is significant. That has led to an institutionalization of caution and a resistance to new modes of sharing information. According to the Nature commentary, this scholarly society is big-businesslike.
The world's largest scientific society is the ACS, which has about 155,000 members, including 19,000 international members. It is a non-profit organization, but nevertheless behaves very much like a commercial entity with regard to the information services it develops and offers, such as its CAS and proprietary identifier system. This behaviour may derive from the dominant role of members and customers from the commercial sector in the society, who tend to perceive of chemical information mainly as an economic asset, rather than as a common good. It could be argued that CAS's proprietary policy towards large-scale use of the identifier system undermines widespread experimentation and innovation by third parties that rely on the accurate integration of chemical information. Such integration is necessary for a web of shared chemical resources.
Boy, does that ever sound familiar.
Sharing resources or preserving assets?
OCLC is libraries' CAS. It's a non-profit organization that is supposedly member-driven and designed to help us share resources for greater efficiency. Its values are library values, according to its website.
Our model is built on the same ideals shared by the institutions we serve—sharing, community and efficiency. And the benefits of OCLC membership are likewise similar to those experienced by users of memory institutions: access to shared resources, a community of study, systematic improvements and opportunities to advance the profession.
Yet the organization has often seemed to be operating in a cloud of corporate majesty, acquiring businesses and mopping up the competition, developing new product lines in competition with other vendors, and charging a great deal for their services while vigorously fending off upstarts that might challenge their hegemony.
One small example of how thoroughly corporate culture had saturated OCLC came in 2003, when it filed a trademark infringement suit against the Library Hotel, which whimsically numbers its rooms using invented Dewey numbers. (Though Dewey Decimal may seem a sturdy relic of popular culture, OCLC acquired it in 1988 from Forest Press and licenses its use to libraries.)
OCLC’s announcement of the settlement is comical in its surfeit of trademarks. It quotes the owners of the hotel as saying, “We do not believe that our use of the Dewey® trademarks in our beautiful boutique hotel near the New York Public Library infringes OCLC's Dewey® trademarks . . . But acknowledging OCLC's Dewey® trademarks and making a charitable contribution to promote reading by children, rather than spending money litigating, seems to be a reasonable way to resolve this matter.” ®ight.
While library catalogs are typically available for searching online without requiring payment, WorldCat, our shared catalog, was not available to the general public other than by library subscription until recently; even now, the free online version of Worldcat only includes the holdings of libraries that are paid-up members of OCLC and that subscribe to the proprietary version of WorldCat. There's no indication on the free website that when you try to "find items in a library near you," your local library may not be included. Instead, you’ll be told the books you are looking for are as many miles away as the nearest OCLC member library.
When OCLC claimed some exclusive rights over the use of records member libraries had contributed, a firestorm erupted. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) issued a report that said, in part, "ARL members, and OCLC members generally, are well served by the unfettered use and re-use of bibliographic records and data. Such use encourages development of innovative services and makes library collections more visible—outcomes that are themselves stated aims of the Policy." The report laid out internal contradictions in the policy and the possible implications. OCLC was forced to withdraw it pending revisions.
But before long, it became clear why a revision of the policy was suddenly pressing: OCLC was entering the ILS market with its own product. Libraries that used WorldCat Local as a discovery layer would be able to save money and ditch the under-the-hood systems if they adopted the OCLC integrated system. In turn, the founder of an ILS company decided to launch a cataloging service that would be an affordable alternative to OCLC. “Online cataloging services typically consume a significant portion of a library’s budget,” SkyRiver’s website states. “SkyRiver changes this picture by providing comprehensive services at a very affordable price.”
But just as some major customers were planning to come onboard, OCLC threw a spanner in the works by increasing the cost of uploading records to OCLC that would zero out any savings. OCLC clearly feels that the revenue from cataloging services is essential to maintain their position. I knew something strange was afoot when I got a letter from Larry Alford, OCLC Board of Trustees chair, saying “As you may know, some alternative service providers are offering OCLC members services that enable them to bypass the WorldCat cataloging service and to find cataloging records at a reduced cost.” (This, of course, has always been possible, and even necessary for libraries that can’t afford OCLC.)
“Viewed at the individual library level, these alternative services may provide practical and economical sense in the short run. Unfortunately, they also hold the potential to undo the work that libraries and the OCLC cooperative have done together these past 40 years, since the subscriptions to the cataloging service support far more than just access to easy-to-locate bibliographic records.”
Michigan State University’s director of libraries, Clifford H. Haka, who was caught short when projected savings were devoured by unexpectedly high charges from OCLC, disagrees. "We've been OCLC members for 40 years—we're the ones who built this database."
Jonathan Rochkind writes on his blog, Bibliographic Weirdness, “You can try to stick to the business model of 20 years ago, harming the interests of actual libraries in the process, and probably fighting a losing battle anyway. Or you can adjust to new environments with new business models . . . discouraging people from supplying records to their resource sharing network (with infeasible prices) threatens to reduce the value of their assets.”
OCLC wants to know what it should do, given it pays its bills and salaries with income from cataloging services. Well, welcome to the 21st century. You’re facing exactly the dilemma publishers and scholars face now that the old business models have broken down. You can dig in, ignore the problem and try to fend off alternatives while preserving the status quo—but that strategy is not likely to work for the long haul.
Enough of walls
In Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” an elderly neighbor insists that the boulders that have been toppled by nature be replaced every spring. “Good fences make good neighbors,” he says, though the narrator isn’t so sure.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Those of us who think sharing is good and that monopolies are not want to know why our bibliographic records should be considered an asset to be controlled rather than a public good. It seems as if OCLC is like the neighbor who won’t entertain changes to the way things have always been done.
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me. I would like to see boulders toppled in the sun.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books this year.
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