[Eg-oversight-board] Agenda suggestion: Research if EG community can use OCLC records

[Yamil Suarez]

Rogan,

Thanks for the feedback. I agree with your interpretation, but I am not a lawyer. I would consider writing to OCLC directly to see if the OCLC and the EG board could come up with an agreement to use OCLC records for the benefit of OCLC Evergreen users (and those that are not OCLC users). The OCLC information I linked to mentions that OCLC often work out agreements with "agents" to work with them directly. I think by some definitions of "agents", the EG community could qualify as an agent.

Thanks again,
Yamil

 


On May 13, 2014, at 1:17 PM, Rogan Hamby <rogan.hamby at gmail.com> wrote:

> The document is interesting but fairly straight forward and it separates out rights and privileges into two groups though it doesn't explicitly say so.  One set of privileges is those of any OCLC members who may download the records.  The rights are those of the members who create them.  Note, I'm not arguing whether this document is right or wrong, merely how I read it's (sometimes inferred) assertions.  
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> A key part for any OCLC member is :
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> The WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities policy outlines OCLC members' rights to:
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> 	• Transfer their data to individual scholars for their personal, academic or scientific research or study;
> 	• Transfer their data to library consortia and public agencies working on behalf of libraries;
> 	• Transfer their data to other libraries and educational, cultural or scholarly institutions, whether these institutions are members of OCLC or nonmembers;
> 	• Transfer their data to agents acting on their behalf.
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> So, this would exclude (if enforceable, again not saying it's right, just looking at what it says) use in Evergreen of any OCLC record.  However, and this is a really big however, we next have the rights of the creators.  Now, this doesn't preclude potential use but it's OCLC saying "other than their use in OCLC and as outlined above we don't set the rules for the records, that's up to the record creators, we don't own them."
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> OCLC does not say this is required but is encouraging release under an open license, specifically the Open Data Commons by Attribution license.  A full discussion of those responsibilities would be an email thread in it's own right but essentially the idea is that in some non-trivial way that folks are likely to see we could re-use OCLC records released under this license if we attribute the source and license.  I think this could be done on a record by record basis within the MARC.  We would need to identify those rights grants and ownership on a case by case basis but I think of several ways that might practically work.  We could probably leave implementation for another discussion though.
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> However (again), we can not use the OCN, OCLC that consider that it's property but that's the only part of the MARC record it's claiming ownership of.  
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