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

[Rogan Hamby]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 3:15 PM, Dan Wells <dbw2 at calvin.edu> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> For what it's worth, I'm not reading things the same as Rogan.  The
> licensing page [1] mentions that OCLC "recommends that the Open Data
> Commons Attribution (ODC-BY) license be used by OCLC members who want to
> release their library catalogs under an open data license structure."  If a
> member can make their entire catalog available for download by providing
> attribution, I imagine any member could make several hundred RDA records
> available, provide said attribution, and not have any problems with this
> policy whatsoever.  This interpretation assumes the RDA records in question
> are for things the library actually owns; pulling arbitrary records out of
> OCLC for this purpose would be considerably murkier.
>

I'm not sure from how that differs from my interpretation so I apologize if
I'm restating some.  My point would be that the OCLC claims that by
including records in worldcat that members assign certain rights to OCLC
and other worldcat members and they list those there.  However, they
maintain ownership of their own records anywhere not explicitly granted in
their membership which is a fairly standard copyright concept.  So, an OCLC
member could contribute their own RDA records to the Evergreen project but
not someone else's - unless they know that those records are released under
the open license - or another similar one.  The open data license is a
recommendation OCLC makes but not required and not necessarily notated
inside the records.  So, if someone pulled down those records to donate  to
the test data it would be incumbent on them to check with who made the
records.

The fact that the records are descriptive of items they own or not is
immaterial in this case.

Now, there is another discussion that can be had about should these things
be copy writable at all, or licensable in general, if they are descriptive
of a work rather than unique works in their own rights and as much as I
would love to debate that point it's not in the scope of the OCLC page
Yamil pointed out.

Also, while OCLC sets aside the OCLC number as unique, they do so to make
> it more open.  The same licensing page says "the OCN can be treated as if
> it is in the public domain and can be included in any data exposure
> mechanism or activity as public domain data."  This is really just a
> footnote the conversation, but I thought it worth clarifying.
>
>
Thanks for that point, I missed that.


> Dan
>
>
> [1] http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/community/record-use.en.html
> Also see:
> http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/community/record-use/data-licensing.en.html
>
>
> Daniel Wells
> Library Programmer/Analyst
> Hekman Library, Calvin College
> 616.526.7133
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