Keep the Zotero going
As quoted at CT:
OCLC was founded in 1967 by Fred Kilgour, a pioneering Ohio librarian, with a simple idea: Instead of having every library in the country separately catalog a book—laboriously entering its title, author, and subjects in just the right format—why not have one person enter the cataloging information, upload it to a central computer, and then let everyone else download a copy from there? It was called WorldCat, for World Catalog, and it’s been a resounding success. … OCLC’s control passed from librarians and academics to business people (its senior executive comes from consulting firm Deloitte & Touche). They realized they had a monopoly on their hands … used the resulting flow of cash to fund a spree of acquisitions of commercial companies and expand into other fields … dragged its feet in getting library records on the Web …All this was bad, but it was tolerable. At least folks could build an alternative to OCLC. So that’s what I and others have been doing—Open Library provides a free collection of over 20 million book records that anyone can browse, download, contribute to, and reuse for absolutely free. Naturally, OCLC hasn’t been a fan. They’ve been trying to kill it from the beginning—threatening its funders with lawsuits, insulting it in the press, and putting pressure on member libraries not to cooperate. … But recently, it’s gone one step way too far. Not satisfied with controlling the world’s largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It’s now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library. It’s not just Open Library that’s at risk here—LibraryThing, Zotero, even some new Wikipedia features being developed are threatened.
Labels: Open_Source
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