OCLC MEMBERS COUNCIL REPORT
By Kevin A. Furniss
Greetings from your correspondent from OCLC Members Council. The Members Council met October 26-28, 2003, and the following is my synopsis of the activities of greatest interest to the OLAC Membership.
OCLC Cataloging Partners Program (CPP)
Greg McKinney, Director of Contract Services and Chris Mottayaw, Marketing Manager, OCLC, provided information about this new service, an extension of TechPro. It aims to provide shelf-ready titles to libraries in partnership with library material vendor
s. Each vendor partner must bring something to the partnership that will benefit libraries and OCLC. Many of the partnerships enable creation of MARC records prior to publication (such as pre-release videos), thereby getting these records into WorldCat
in advance of library needs for acquisitions and cataloging. Examples of the physical processing, including scanned images, available for book covers and AV packaging, were shown. For more information about this program, link to: <http://www.oclc.org/catalogingpartners/>.
Batchloading
Discussions with the Heads of Technical Services of Large Research Libraries (Big Heads) have been taking place throughout 2003 concerning batchloading issues. PCC records are now extracted and loaded through a separate job stream. The main remaining is
sue concerns the relative priority OCLC has been giving to loading new (non-PCC) records vs. adding holdings to existing records. OCLC is seeking input from the Members Council Cataloging and Metadata Interest Group on this issue.
The current workflow was described as follows: the first time a file is received from an institution for batchloading, it is evaluated first for the setting of holdings. A secondary evaluation may be required for adding records. The evaluation for addi
ng records is very labor intensive and time-consuming relative to the evaluation for setting holdings. There are 4 staff members dedicated to the task of batch evaluation. OCLC has a 90-day turnaround time service agreement with the networks on new file
evaluation. The current average is 40 days. Within the past 3 years 140 million holdings were set and 5 million records were added via batchload. Several large state projects have service agreements that emphasize setting holdings for resource sharing
.
No algorithm currently exists for adding computer files and mixed materials/archival records via batch, so these records cannot currently be added. This is on OCLC’s list of development projects for the future.
Z39.50 Update
Gary Houk of OCLC presented an update on the record nabbing issue from last year's Members Council meetings. Deb Bendig from OCLC Reference Services was invited to discuss the use of Z39.50 in FirstSearch. Deb stated that many libraries demand Z39.50 ac
cess to FirstSearch so that their patrons can use their local system interface to search it. Reference use agreements specifically prohibit use of FirstSearch for cataloging. However, it is known that some libraries abuse this agreement and institute wo
rkflow changes to avoid cataloging charges. Work is underway to determine the extent of the problem. In the future, OCLC needs to find ways to neutralize pricing so that it becomes advantageous to become an OCLC member.
Gary defines commercial record nabbing as follows: "The use of a Z39.50 software client to
broadcast searches against multiple library catalogs to find and download MARC records without the
knowledge or consent of the library catalog owners." Last year a letter-writing campaign was
undertaken, directed to a large firm that searches library catalogs using Z39.50 and delivers that
information to its customers. This campaign initially seemed to be gaining results, but soon lost its
value since t he firm has refused to comply and has made some points in response that are not legally
valid. So, OCLC is now proposing to fight software with software by developing a Z39.50 firewall
program. This program would be available for voluntary download by any member library. It will allow
libraries to set parameters to specify who can or cannot access (by IP address) the library catalog via
Z39.50 and the type of output available (perhaps only brief records would be supplied). About 6 months
of development time and testing are needed to make a firewall program available.
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Last updated: November 24, 2003
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