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July 12, 2022 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

'The OCLC v Clarivate Dilemma' by Karen Coyle

What seems to specifically have OCLC’s dander up is that Ex Libris states that it will allow any and all libraries, not just its Alma customers, to use [its new MetaDoor] service for free. As the service does not yet exist it is unknown how it could affect the library metadata sharing environment. It may succeed, it may fail. If it succeeds, the technology that Ex Libris develops will be a logical next step in bibliographic data sharing, but its effect on OCLC is hard to predict. …

A couple of other things before I look at some specific points in the lawsuit. One is that WorldCat is not the only bibliographic database used for sharing of metadata. Some smaller library companies also have their own shared databases. These are much smaller than WorldCat and the libraries that use them generally are 1) unable to afford OCLC’s member fees and 2) do not have need of the depth or breadth of WorldCat’s bibliographic data. …

And another: we’re slowly moving to a less ‘thing’-based world to a ‘data’-based world. Yes, scholars still need books and journals, but increasingly our information seeking returns tiny bites, not big thoughts. You can rue that, but I think it’s only going to get worse. … Us ‘book people’ are hanging on to a vast repository that is less and less looking forward and more and more becoming dusty and crusty. We don’t want to lose that valuable archive, but it is hard to claim that we are not a fading culture.

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