OCLC Policy – What is the Question?

Karen Coyle takes a good long look at the OCLC policy we’ve all grown to know so well (or maybe not so well). She hopes that OCLC’s members will insist on a clarification of the goals of the policy as well as on how those goals will be managed over time. Sticking her neck out, she concludes that:

* there cannot be an workable policy without a clear problem statement to guide it
* a library data silo is quite possibly not the best thing for the library community today, and this needs to be addressed
* the idea that “what is good for OCLC is always good for OCLC’s members” is unreasonable; no contract should be accepted that doesn’t provide for negotiation between the library members and OCLC regarding uses of the WorldCat records