[Eg-oversight-board] Information for requesting SFC review of sharing OCLC MARC records

[Yamil Suarez]

Hello,

Here is a summary of the main bits of information I have so far
compiled about the legality of sharing OCLC MARC records within the Eg
green community. Others may have additional information on comments on
the matter. Several in the EG community feel that we should be in the
clear in sharing OCLC records based on current OCLC policy, even
between organizations that are not OCLC members for the sake of
improving Evergreen. Though many of us would feel better having the
SFC look into this for us.



Background:

Some EG community members would like to make EG handle RDA style MARC
records better. OCLC has high quality RDA MARC records that we would
like to share between community members and make part of a common test
data set.


OCLC information on the use of their records:

A) Letter from OCLC employee, Roy Tennant, to public mailing list

https://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1404&L=CODE4LIB&F=&S=&P=227426

"...
Subject: Re: barriers to open metadata?
From: Roy Tennant <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 20:37:00 -0700

> This has now instead become a reasonable recommendation
> concerning ODC-BY licensing [3] but the confusion and uncertainty
> about which records an OCLC member may redistribute remains.
>
> [3] http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/2012/201248.en.html

Allow me to try to put this confusion and uncertainty to rest once and for all:

ALL THE THINGS. ALL.

At least as far as we are concerned. I think it's well past time to put the
past in the past.

Meanwhile, we have just put nearly 200 million works records up as linked
open data. [1], [2], [3]. If that doesn't rock the library open linked data
world, then no one is paying attention.

Roy

[1] http://oclc.org/en-US/news/releases/2014/201414dublin.html
[2] http://dataliberate.com/2014/04/worldcat-works-197-million-nuggets-of-linked-data/
[3] http://hangingtogether.org/?p=3811


..."




B) Question I posed to OCLC support and their answer

"...Hello, I am the system administrator of the Berklee College of
Music library (OCLC symbol: BKC). We use the Evergreen open-source
ILS, and I am actively participating in helping make Evergreen work
with RDA. When collaborating with other Evergreen developers on
Evergreen RDA bugs, I often refer to how my OCLC RDA MARC records look
on my system, but it would be great if I could share a few OCLC RDA
records with fellow developers so they could test them on their own
test servers with the same MARC RDA data.

Up to this point I have assumed I could never share records that
Berklee has received from OCLC with other institutions. I wanted to
finally confirm if I was being overtly cautious, or in fact following
OCLC's wishes.  I recently was told of the following post by an OCLC
employee, which makes it looks that some OCLC records can be shared.
Though I cannot assume this applies to MARC RDA records that we get
through the Connexion service.
https://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1404&L=CODE4LIB&F=&S=&P=227426
 Again for the record, I have not shared any MARC records, and my only
interest is to share about a dozen RDA MARC records with fellow
Evergreen open-source developers to help the system work with RDA.
Thanks in advance, Yamil Suarez..."


C) Response from OCLC support

"...There is a discussion of WorldCat record use at
http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/community/record-use.en.html and the
associated links,
especially http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/community/record-use/policy/questions.en.html.
   If that information and
the links don't address your question, please use the email link on
that page to email recorduse at oclc.org with further questions. ..."



Not sure how to best proceed from here on to have the SFC involved.
Perhaps we can collectively write a new letter to send to the
"recorduse at oclc.org" address I got from OCLC. In this letter we can
again restate how we would like to simply use a small number of their
records to just help improve EG, and not to become their competitor or
to undermine their business model.


Thanks in advance,
Yamil