I've just been learning about searching OPACs in my cataloging class and reading articles about how OPACs might be going the way of the dinosaur unless they can meet user's needs and the technological changes we're all experiencing. So another article in American Libraries, April 2008, caught my attention. It's called "Backed by Internet Archive, Entrepreneur Takes on OCLC." Is there really a kind of "war," or maybe a better word is competition, between OCLC and OPACs and the internet? The title makes it sound that way.
The entrepreneur in the article is Aaron Swartz, who's only 21. But he's very experienced when it comes to the internet. At the age of 14, he helped write the RSS feed format. (I have to admit that until recently I didn't even know what RSS feeds were.) Apparently what he's challenging is OCLC's subscription based World Cat system. This reminds me of a previous blog about public domain and the internet. It sounds like Aaron is part of the movement to make as many books and other materials freely available to the internet user as possible. He is starting a free online book catalog called Open Library.
He says that he first became interested in this idea when he was browsing through book stacks in his local library. He came upon many books he'd never heard of. It turns out they were out of print books. Publishers weren't interested in promoting them because they weren't in print. Amazon wasn't selling them. And "libraries had their catalogs hidden behind Google-unfriendly OPACs." He wants to create a website with a page for every book. Possibly internet users will end up adding to this website much like they do to Wikipedia. And he wants to link the site to Wikipedia and maybe LibraryThing.
A lot of the funding for this project comes from Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance. Internet Archive has been scanning books for libraries, but wanted books to be made more widely available to the general public.
It seems that the two don't necessarily have to be in conflict - OPACs and this new Open Library. A project like this will promote books and that seems to be in line with what libraries try to do. I hope the two will find ways to work together in making information about books available to an even wider audience. Hopefully OPACs will not go the way of the dinosaur, but will become part of the new technology revolution. Perhaps this kind of cooperation will serve to bring more people to libraries - on the web and in person- creating more book lovers and readers than ever.
I'm trying to imagine how much the internet will have to grow to accommodate all the information in all the library OPACs all over the world. And in World Cat. It's all pretty amazing.
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I agree -- there are many benefits to come form collaboration.
There is already "one page per book" on the Internet, it's WorldCat.org, where we have about 120 million records compared to OpenLibrary.org's 18 million, and we've done everything we can to get those pages indexed by Google and other web indexes, including direct negotiations, crawler-friendly URLs, etc. If they don't crawl all of us I don't see why they would crawl all of OpenLibrary.org.
What Roy doesn't tell you is that his "direct negotiations with Google" include providing them with only a small subset of their records (2-3 million from what I hear) and making them sign onerous contract terms about their usage.
OCLC has not been great about collaboration.
Google didn't want more than that, and as has been well documented (for example, here: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july08/hagedorn/07hagedorn.html ) Google doesn't get anywhere close to getting all the resources available from a single source.
As for collaboration, we have been collaborating for many years -- we are built upon it in actual fact -- and we know that lasting cooperation comes from all parties benefiting from the collaboration.
Contrary to Roy's expectations, Google has indexed 7M pages of Open Library and adds .5M every other day or so. If they were willing to open up, I'm sure we could help WorldCat achieve similar results.
As Roy notes, OCLC was originally designed to be a collaboration among libraries. But, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, it has grown and grown and now Roy suggests it requires all deals to benefit it. What happened to just helping people find books?
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