The New Cooperative Cataloging

Readers of an earlier post on my blog will have seen that I dived into the Open WorldCat Not-Quite-A-Wiki Book Review Cache for the first time as a reviewer this week. I also posted a note on why it is critical for libraries to participate more fully in the Linking Economy [First Class Objects and the Currency of Linking]. Not just important, but critical.

So, I did one myself… gotta eat your own dog food, eh? OK, well, you have to establish an account (user name, password, that stuff).  Another password to manage… argh. But still… it’s important, so I did it.

Then cometh the dreaded TERMS & CONDITIONS, in which I learn, among other things, that by contributing content, I agree to defend OCLC in any legal disputes arising from my content.  My immediate  vision is of Lil’ Ole Me… armed with naught but fountain pen against the onslaught of Smaug and his law clerks, defending the Mothership from harm (sorry about the mixed allusions... too many allegories lately).

Well, that made me swallow hard. Visions of legal fees withheld from my salary for the rest of my unnatural life. How in heaven’s name are we going to get people to contribute time and effort in the service of the Bibliographic Cooperative if we indenture them legally in the process? Well, my immediate response was to whine about it (those who know me will not find this startling).  One reply to my whine (by a colleague with legal training who does not work for OCLC) went something like: ‘well, of course OCLC has to do this. Look at the international cartoon crisis!’

Hmmmm... that brought me up short.

OK… the risks are not zero. But risk aversion threatens to obscure the values we stand for. Some of those risks, of course, are real; others have the character of being probabilistically small but of horrendous consequences. Mostly it’s impossible to tell ahead of time.  Therein lies the rub.

The biggest risk of all, for our profession, is not to be at the table, not to stand up for what we believe, not to bring our professional values to bear in the most effective manner possible. In the present case, that means enriching the public link structure of bibliography.

My exhortations:
To OCLC:

• Make WorldCat Wiki reviews link-addressable and harvestable
• Perhaps use Creative Commons licenses to establish the content as solidly part of the intellectual commons that is our foundation (we’ve done this in the past with WebJunction, as I learned yesterday in my visit to the WebJunction offices in Seattle).

To Librarians:

• Let nothing you read go un-reviewed.  Don’t feel you are competent to review your physics library’s latest treatise on string theory? Take responsibility for recruiting your patrons to do it.
• We have the scarcest asset on the Web – Public Trust. Advise your users. Make the creation of linkable advisory content a personal priority. 100,000 librarians x 1 review per week x 50 weeks = a pretty good start.
• Take the risk.

To Libraries:

• Recognize and promote this effort. Provide incentives to staff. This is the New Cooperative Cataloging for the Web.

A note about the image in this post.  It is from a larger work by Falah Shwan, an Iraqi refugee living in Columbus.  I'm not really sure about my reproduction rights -- Marguerite and I purchased the work from which it is excerpted, and it has occurred to me that it is a perfect logo for the Radical Militant Libraian T-shirts that we all should have ;-).  If there is interest, we will try to track down the artist and see about licensing it.

Comments

[K.G. Schneider]

Stu, a lot of us are reviewing. Just not on OW. One of the top reviewers on Amazon is a librarian. The Big O is completely missing the most fundamental elements of game theory in how it offers reviewing capabilities. I repeat, nobody wants to drop reviews into a black hole.

[MGMason]

Great article! And yes on the radical, militant librarian t-shirt.