I was going to write a post wherein I mentioned the OCLC policy changes or “clarifications” or whatever they are and linked out to a few library blogs and sites like Inside HigherEd and Slashdot and the like to show how this is being discussed inside and outside the library world.

But then Jessamyn did pretty much the same post that I was going to do. Please read that if you haven’t already.

My main original contribution was going to be the observation that perhaps in the library blogosphere we have been so busy hating ALA and ILS vendors that we have forgotten to hate OCLC, too. In truth, I wasn’t inclined to be too sympathetic to OCLC’s point of view, but (as I would have said in this now-mostly-redundant post) I would really like to read something written by a person who wasn’t either on OCLC’s payroll, or intimately involved in a project directly threatened by the OCLC “clarifications.”

Then my main man Josh Neff posted a link to FriendFeed for Stefano Mazzocchi’s post Rule #1 for Surviving Paradigm Shifts: Don’t S**t Where You Eat. So I was going to link to that and say that it was one of the more convincing posts I have read about the issue.

But then Jessamyn did pretty much the same post that I was going to do. Again.

So let me just say this before Jessamyn can say it. Mazzocchi has a lot to say about OCLC’s monopoly and how they can best protect it. He says in part:

OCLC can do exactly one of two things now:

  1. open up itself so that it becomes the de-facto centroid of an otherwise opened and more diverse ecosystem, where people are excited to contribute to them and not forced to.
  2. try to use all the power they have to stop others from competing with them and displace them.

The first one seems like the most risky one, but it’s really the second.

and

By locking the place down even more and alienating a bunch of alpha-librarians, they’re doing nothing but catalyze the movement that will eventually lead to their obsolescence and the establishment of another organization, similar in every aspect to OCLC save for one: the short sightedness in how to entice contribution without alienating the contributors.

Coincidentally, I was reading Matthew Battles’ Library: An Unquiet History today and came across this interesting tidbit on page 29 about the Library of Alexandria:

In an effort to stop the growth of the libraries at Rhodes and Pergamum, both of which threatened Alexandria’s preeminence, the city’s rulers banned the export of papyrus. The move backfired, however, spurring the Pergamenes to invent parchment (charta pergamenum), which for its strength and reusability would prove to be the preferred writing medium in Europe for more than a thousand years.

That seems like a reasonably appropriate cautionary tale.