See you there!

In additional to individual (consumer) sales, Google has the ability to sell institutional subscriptions that permit users within an institution to view the full text of all the books within the "Institutional Subscription Database" (ISD).  Access to the ISD is not perpetual but available only for the duration of the subscription.  Pricing for institutional subscriptions is based on the category of the institution and its size (predominantly measured by FTE count of the student body). 

As for most licensed content subscriptions, access is limited (in educational institutions) to faculty, students, researchers, staff members, librarians, other personnel, business invitees, and walk-in users from the general public.

One of the things that struck me as a notable presumption about institutional subscriptions relates to Google's desire to manage inappropriate behavior.  That's an understandable position --  how can they achieve that goal? 

In the STM content market that university libraries are most familiar with, a licensor will monitor usage and request intervention by the licensee if they notice that (for example) the last five volumes had been downloaded in their entirety over a period of 5 days from a single IP address.  In usual recourse, such an individual IP is denied access to the resource, and notice sent to the licensee's responsible party, often an individual in the library or consortial office.  That individual will then rectify the situation according to a well-practiced script.  

Since Google is set to establish institutional licenses along the same lines - and they've been steadily interviewing organizations who already license their content about best practices  over the last few months - you might think they would utilize similar arrangements.  But that's not the case. 

Let's take a look at a clause in 4.1(e) Institutional Subscription Terms and Conditions.

[...] (5) include the right for Google to restrict or terminate a user’s account, including additional restrictions on printing and copy/paste, if the user distributes the copyrighted material from a Book in a manner that is prohibited by the terms and conditions or applicable law ...  

Hmmm.  A "user's account" in an institutional subscription.  This suggests an authentication tied to specific identity.  In fact, Google also needs this capacity to police the limited class-based annotation functionality provided in the settlement, which in turn suggests the need to associate students with class registration information.   How would Googe implement an individual authentication and authorization model?

Do we imagine that Google will encourage the requisite and widespread deployment of Internet2's Shibboleth?  Ur, no, probably not.

Actively supporting OAuth and OpenID for Google Book Search so that individuals can use their Yahoo! or Facebook logins?  Hmm, probably not.

Support a diverse set of institutional IDs founded under wildly varying assumptions of affiliation and security, and often bifurcated by faculty & staff versus student status in fundamental profile characteristics such as account durability?  Possible, but difficult.

Requiring every individual member of an insitutional subscription to establish Google-held accounts?  Maybe.  Conceivably these could be Google Accounts for Education (GA4E) or Google Accounts for Your Domain (GA4YD).

In public concerns about privacy, some  imagine that our worst fears are that individuals will be tracked through cookies.  Rather, on an institutional basis, including in U.S. government agency subscriptions, it might well be the case that users have to establish Google accounts tied to institional boundaries to provide the kind of auditable transaction record and compliance regime specified by the settlement.  If that is the case, then not only will Google know what I've been reading, and what books I've been searching, but they could well correlate with certainty against my news subscriptions, my Google Map searches ... the list grows long.  

From an institution's perspective, would I (at a major research university) be ready to deal with the support requirements explaining that every user of GBS must create their own Google account (if where there is no GA4E, separate and distinct from their existing accounts), and that each individual user is in essence a party to a license under very different terms, potentially, than those governing access to other licensed resources?  

Many universities have previously turned away from Google Accounts for Higher Ed due to privacy concerns, including concerns relating to liability and identification of responsible parties in cases of private, State, or Federal legal action, including subpoena.  They now face winding up entering an unexpected set of relationships through an institutional license with Google. 

Now would be a good time to receive clarification about this issue.  

Please reset your links!

Thanks much. 

There is a lot to ponder: This is arguably a massive re-writing of copyright for books without any legislative input; Marybeth Peters (MBP), the U.S. Registrar of Copyrights, observed that the settlement essentially proposes a private agreement for compulsory licensing between a large class of IP holders and world’s largest search engine.  The potential scope and policy ramifications are significant.  MBP mentioned that there might be treaty implications under international conventions.  And despite that, one of the most shocking of her statements was that the Copyright Office has not received a single inquiry from any of the 535 elected representatives of the people of the United States.  Not. One.

Orphan works

What I want to discuss in this post is a persistent theme that ranged across the panels and discussions: concern with the status of orphan works in the settlement proposal.  Only a subset of the works covered by the settlement will actually be orphan: some of the works will have identifiable rights holders, and many new rights holders will come forward.  Indeed, the settlement offers to change the rights status of a great number of works, which is by and large a useful clarification.  However, there will be a tremendous number of works for which the rights status is murky at best: they may be likely in-copyright, but with no identified rightsholder, or they might be likely out of copyright, but no one can easily verify this to be the case.

An indirect indication of the magnitude of this body of unclaimed books is foretold by Google’s set-aside of $45 million to compensate rightsholders (RH) for already digitized works.  There are differing payments for books and inserts, but let’s assume all works with newly identified rightsholders are books, which is the maximum payout ($60/title).  Dividing $45 million by $60 gives us a maximum count of 750,000 titles expected compensation.   The settlement does note that $45 million might not be enough to cover claims and more funds might be required to be added by Google, but nonetheless this must be a rough, best-guess on Google’s, the publishers, and the authors part.

There are rough estimates of around 7 million digitized volumes in GBS; subtracting 750,000 newly identified works gives us 6.25 million.  Let’s take a guess that there are maybe 1.5 million public domain works (this is not entirely out of the blue, but informed by earlier orphan works studies and reports), leaving 4.75 million titles.   That’s a lot of books – about 2/3 of the total.   It might be more, it might be less; it is a big number.

This is not inexplicable.  There are a large number of ways that books might fall into orphan status.  A quick consultation of Peter Hirtle’s copyright table at Cornell Univ. allows us to see how easy this is.   The impact of foreign rights is fiendishly complicated, and even the rules for U.S. publications are baroque; for older works it is a crafty rightsholder indeed who can figure out whether they might retain a claim.  As Peter Hirtle observed to me in an email, “The lengthening copyright terms and the gradual removal of formalities (especially the automatic renewal of works published since 1963) means that works that would have passed into the public domain in the past because the rights owners weren't concerned are still protected.  The chances that the rights holders are either unidentifiable or not locatable also goes up.”

Further, many Copyright Office records have not yet been digitized and require manual examination; a very high portion of these records are dirty, with missing metadata (including basic information such as Title or Author); obviously incorrect metadata (e.g. misspellings); transposed metadata fields; updated records with no explicit connection to superseded records; and so on.  (In other words, they are a real mess).   There have been several efforts to digitize these data, with varying success and rigor.   The most active rights identification efforts currently are those at Google and the University of Michigan.

A large number of these orphans are going to be truly public domain books, just like pre-1923 works.  However, we may never know that they actually have public domain status due to historically incomplete record keeping, and the lack of a national rights tracking and notification infrastructure.

Additionally, unlike the proposed orphan works legislation which almost, but didn’t, pass through the House and Senate last year, the rights claiming process is opt-in.  This simplifies things considerably for Google and the BRR, because – unlike the proposed legislation – the BRR is not required to undertake at any point a “diligent search” for the rightsholder/s of works on an item by item basis.  This puts the burden on the RHs to come forward to make their claims.  The settlement parties are correct to observe that the agreement engendered perhaps the single largest class notification program in the history of class action settlements in the United States, but despite its completeness, it is just not going to reach everyone who might have a stake in the suit (e.g., classic lineage problems such as the daughter of the niece of the co-author who is the last surviving heir, who doesn’t even know there were transmitted rights).

An entire group of authors that the notification will not reach are “non- active” authors of orphan works, who do not realize that they may have rights to titles digitized by Google under the proposed settlement.   Orphan works authors and rightsholders won’t opt out of the settlement, nor will they opt-in; by definition they are not aware they have a right to file claims.  This raises troubling questions about the representative completeness of the author sub-class in the settlement.

Monetization of Orphans

At Columbia Law on Friday, the most vexing issue for orphans was the distribution of income from their monetization by Google for the benefit of BRR, Google, and the Class parties (authors and publishers of books, as identified in the proposal).  The distribution of income differs considerably depending on whether it is derived from non-subscription sales (mostly, individual purchases or licensed uses), versus through institutional sales to libraries and related, approved, organizations.

In the rough, the non-subscription sale income goes first to the BRR for operational assistance, and to fund a reserve endowing support for future BRR programs.  In the consequent improbable event that there are leftover funds, they are apportioned to RHs until they have received 70 percent of the gross revenues for each book, and then (finally) leftover funds go to not for profits supporting reading, literacy, libraries, etc.   That trickle down is not likely to generate much dew on the thirsty gardens of the public sector.

This distribution is likely to generate an appreciable percentage of the total income for the BRR, a complex entity with many diverse goals, including policy, arbitration, distribution, and rights maintenance, in addition to its own internal administration.   (Even with these funds, it seems worthwhile to question whether the BRR can support itself as an independent concern without additional on-going subsidy.)

For subscription sales, which might well be ultimately the most significant source of income, the revenue is apportioned straight to the rightsholders by the BRR.  (I’ve appended the relevant settlement language at the end of this post, in its entirety).

The essential problem is that the settlement parties have a vested interest in maintaining a monopoly over access to orphan books. Marybeth Peters speculated that the resolve of settlement participants to support future orphan works legislation might be weakened, regardless of their zeal for such clarification in the past.  As the Chicago Law professor Randal Picker noted at the meeting [slides here], there is a built-in incentive for licensing associations to protect guaranteed income sources from external claimants: the settling parties want to maintain the property status of orphans as copyrighted works against outsiders.

This is wrong on the face of it; it is an abrogation of the public’s right of access that there is no structural incentive to identify public domain works within the corpus of orphans, and that the largest share of revenue generated from their digitization goes to RHs who have, by definition, no right to that income.  Randal Picker suggested that creating a more symmetric MFN status for commercial exploitation of the works covered by the settlement, such as unbundling orphan works by opening them up to exploitation by non-profits, might be a useful attenuation of this inherent danger.

There is a further problem.  In addition to the income from settlement-proposed schemes, Google uniquely will be able to generate income from not-covered uses, such as integrating the content with web, dataset, and news data to build more robust discovery services.  The advertising revenue against this aggregation will be uniquely Google’s to reap.

As Jule Sigall (formerly Copyright Office, now Microsoft) and Jane Ginsburg (Columbia Law) wryly noted at the Columbia Law meeting, it as if Google has managed to maneuver itself to the verge of a court-sanctioned release of potential liability covering the exploitation of orphan books, for the benefit of a single commercial actor.

If this is the best train coming down the tracks, it might be time to throw a red light.

Settlement:

6.3 (a) Unclaimed Funds
(i) Unclaimed Funds-Non-Subscription Revenue Models. Any revenues paid to the Registry and due to Rightsholders of Books under Sections 4.2 (Consumer Purchases), 4.4 (Advertising Revenue Model), 4.8(a)(ii) (Printing), and, if agreed, 4.7(a) – (c) (Print on Demand, Custom Publishing and PDF Download, respectively), but that are unclaimed by such Rightsholders within five (5) years of the last date of the reporting period in which the Books earned such revenues (“Unclaimed Funds – Non-Subscription”), will be distributed by the Registry in accordance with the Plan of Allocation as soon as practicable following the end of such five (5)-year period as follows: (1) first, to defray reasonable and necessary operational expenses of the Registry that are related to its performance, on behalf of the Rightsholders, of the functions described in Section 6.1 (Functions) and, as determined by the Board of Directors of the Registry in the exercise of its fiduciary duties, maintain reserves for such expenses on a proportional revenue basis with respect to revenue from licensees of the Registry other than Google, (2) then, any remaining Unclaimed Funds will be paid on a proportional basis to the Registered Rightsholders until all such Rightsholders of a Book have received, in the aggregate, together with all amounts paid to such Rightsholders under Section 4.5(a) (Obligation to Pay Revenue Share), seventy percent (70%) of the Gross Revenues received by Google for such Book, and (3) then, for any Unclaimed Funds remaining thereafter, to not-for-profit entities described in Section 510(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code chosen by the Registry after consultation with Google and, acting through the Designated Representative, the Participating Libraries and the Cooperating Libraries. The Registry shall choose not-for-profit entities described in Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code that directly or indirectly benefit the Rightsholders and the reading public, and will include entities that advance literacy, freedom of expression, and/or education, and, for avoidance of doubt, will not include the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers or other trade organizations. “Gross Revenues” means all of the revenues received by Google from the Revenue Models identified in this Section 6.3(a) (Unclaimed Funds), and only such Revenue Models.

(ii) Unclaimed Funds-Subscription Revenue Models. Any revenues paid to the Registry and due to Rightsholders of Books under Section 4.1 (Institutional Subscriptions) and, if agreed, Section 4.7(d) (Consumer Subscription Models), but that are unclaimed by such Rightsholders within (5) years of the last date of the reporting period in which the Books earned such revenues (“Unclaimed Funds-Subscription”), will be distributed by the Registry as soon as practicable in accordance with the Plan of Allocation following the end of such five (5)-year period.

In response, Battles writes persuasively that:

Yet the culture of letters has always been subject to disruption and transformation. Indeed, since the advent of print, technologies of the book have changed dramatically, and with them the book’s place in society. The world of letters not only transcends these technological changes—it thrives because of them. Were that not the case, the cultural continuity that Birkerts holds so dear would have been lost long ago.

After documenting the precious rarity of books in the Medieval Ages, hand-crafted gems more scarce than courtiers or cardinals, Battles discusses the impact of the Gutenberg era:

Then, as movable type began to take hold in the age of Copernicus, Erasmus, and Luther, some worried that the printing press would devalue the book. But in fact, it represented a disruption only to the channels of authority that had hitherto controlled the creation and distribution of word and image. Likewise today, the Kindle and other information technologies are less likely to destroy the authority of books than to disrupt the authority of those who control the place of books in our society.

Battles notes that Birkerts uses the experience of the poet Wallace Stevens as an exemplar of holiness of letters, but in contrast to Bikerts, Battles notes the wealth of context around Steven’s poetry and life that the internet has made emergent.  Birkerts cites Bartlett’s quotations, but Battles begs to differ:

Contrast its thin fare with YouTube, where you can listen to the poet himself read "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"—where you'll also find an animated photograph of Stevens performing "No Ideas But In Things" in the poet's own voice; John Ashbery discussing Stevens' impact on his work; or any number of unknown readers reciting Stevens' works in front of their computers. Wikipedia, meanwhile, tells me that a portrait of Stevens' wife Elsie served as the basis of the profile of Mercury's head on the Liberty dime. I can view Stevens' house on Wikipedia, and follow links from his entry there to information about the lives and works of his contemporaries, critics, and poetic legatees. There is a context here far richer than anything the glue-and-boards Bartlett's can offer. But here's the rub: we have to make sense of this cornucopia of information ourselves. Wikipedia is not a one-stop shopping source for tidbits of misinformation; it is a living discourse, inviting dialogue and participation.

It is this prong: dialogue and participation, or as I might wish to suggest, engagement and participation, that is the catalyst for our newest age of letters, our best transformation of the means of communication we have yet sundered from the poverty of our long efforts to better ourselves.

Last week, I had the fortune of attending a Hewlett Foundation meeting on Open Educational Resources (OER); amongst the grantees, there were a wealth of other foundations represented: Wikimedia, Soros, Gates, Lumina, and Moore circulating amongst us.  We had fascinating and compelling conversations; on every turn a new initiative.  I was enthused by the passionate discussions that pulsed around me, and motivated by the unseen fruit that might be borne from the introductions that I and others will make with those not in attendance, conceived in the hope of exposing riches to a greater public, via previously unimagined fulcrums.   On my part, the thrill of introducing Wikimedia Foundation to the Smithsonian Institution: priceless.  Go, for God’s Sakes, Leap at chance!

Yet there was a disquiet in the hallways.  A sense of a slow, growing staleness among the projects.  Those who had attended for two or three years running noted the continuing centrality of the availability of "content" in the roundtable discussions: how do we make more of it available to a larger number?  How shall we describe it?  What content might best be chosen?  These seem vital, and such questions are, but there was a growing sense that it was not all of what makes our futures worthwhile.

It is as Battles noted: engagement and participation, and these were missing from our dancing.  There was a single session (led by Phoenix Wang) on gaming, mobile, and alternative paths through the navigation of knowledge: it was an outlier.  Road Trip Nation was inspiring, and there were a few others as well.  But few ...  few.

It is as if the effort to assist education through the production of OER content has been waylaid by too steadfast an effort.  It is in the context of the culture which the net provides that we craft new advantage in our attempts to re-understand and re-write the world: not merely finding information, but finding the context of it, and working with it.  It is hearing Stevens recite the poetry, or listening to someone discuss the poet’s place in American thought: that is the engagement.  And the participation is working with the poetry, applying it to make something new, either creative, or a new interpretation in our understanding of history, or the struggles of the people that the poetry represents.  That is the participation.

Thoreau wrote in Walden,

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.  Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.   It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.  I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct.  It is true I fear that others may have fallen into it and so helped to keep it open.  The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.

So our own organizations and initiatives.   We should be riding a different road now: certainly as our mission, more content to assist in curricula is a fine thing, let us not wait to get more of it exposed.  But the wealth of our society lies in working with it, and we must press ourselves to construct new tools that facilitate that.

The new presses of the next age; the new libraries and the new museums; they are not measured solely by their resources but by their understanding of the worth of engagement and participation, and their ability to weave their content, as the Guardian so lovingly put in, “into the fabric of the web.”

At its peak, this tendency has spawned conceptions of deeply intertwined systems whose interoperation is preemptively well defined through service oriented architectures (SOA), rather than obtained on an ad-hoc basis through existing lightweight open protocols which inevitably leave much to chance..

SOA architectural approaches are exceedingly expensive on many levels: technical, because they require close attention to program function definition and design; managerial, because controlling uniformity at the expense of local optimization inevitably fails to please customer bases; and temporal, because SOAs are often baroque and require lengthy periods to draft and obtain consensus – and consensus is necessary by definition when one is attempting to impose unanimity across whole continents of scholastic domain, such as the Humanities.  SOAs might succeed if they are contained within the walled gardens of corporate infrastructures with tight command and control, but across heterogeneous and distributed environments such as the open net, they are almost certain to meet Death on someone else’s terms.

About six months ago, in a hallway conversation at the last DLF Forum with principals from the DSpace Foundation (Michelle Kimpton) and Fedora Commons (Sandy Payette, at Cornell Univ.), we strove to articulate a new expectation for interoperability.  Sandy and Michelle made the critical observation that it should be possible, normatively, for the majority of the applications in the information access community (across libraries, museums, research institutes, and information systems departments) to interoperate easily, without explicit pre-definition.  This would permit a user, whether human or machine, to reach from the desktop to the highest cloud storage systems with ease, without a reliance on complex APIs crafted to support bilateral agreements.  Zotero should work with Fedora; Fedora with DuraSpace or with Amazon S3; Hathi should accept content ingest requests from the Participatory Culture Foundation; ARTStor users should be able to push into their Flickr accounts.  And so forth.

The most appealing thing about this vision is that there is no barrier towards its construction except our own willingness to make it happen.  As I played with this insight, what began to make the most sense was a resolution modeled on the CapeTown Open Education Declaration, where individuals and organizations commit to spur the growth of open education initiatives and the availability of open content to benefit education across the globe.  The Declaration defines itself as "a statement of strategy and a statement of commitment. It is meant to spark dialogue, to inspire action and to help the open education movement grow."  And that is exactly what I think we need.

We have, across our broad communities seeking enhanced access to information, a similar opportunity and challenge, which I later christened OpenStack in a starck absence of original eloquence.  (N.B.: There are several other extant "OpenStacks", all generally in the same spirit; e.g., the DataPortability Project has made use of the term; there is an active blog bearing the name as well).  I have not had the necessary epiphany to draft a concrete OpenStack declaration; I appeal to parties with more wit and better grace of pen to lend themselves toward this effort.

The vision of the OpenStack concept is intended to be bracingly modest, achievable, and empowering.  In its essence, it is the acceptance of the responsibility on the part of application developers to facilitate inter-operation through simple, lightweight protocols and API specifications that enable compatibility with the information services and components that range across their greater community.

One does not need necessarily to know what these systems are; in fact, we must assume that we will not have that intelligence.  The elements of common sense and vision play a significant guiding role in OpenStack, combating the dogma of over-specification.  If an application works with discrete content items, then it is reasonable to assume that an API to access those content items under the most liberal license terms possible would enable other content use systems to build unimagined applications; I take the example of the Brooklyn Museum’s recently defined API and its endorsement of Creative Commons licenses.  If one is alternatively drafting a new repository architecture, it is reasonable to assume that permitting content to be pushed into an ingest stream through Atom Pub is fundamental.  And so forth.

This is OpenStack.  Its patrimony is an enhanced access to information: the generation of new ways of exploring and participating in our world by encouraging the combination of the best of OpenCore and open source solutions.  OpenStack is an antidote to the excesses of SOA designs; it embraces what the web does best, and it is parsimonious and economical.  OpenStack rewards flexibility, speed, and good-enough solutions that are comprehensible and permit rapid evolution.

However we outline this declaration, let us pledge to use open, public standards; publish open and straightforward APIs with liberal license terms; relax our requirements for the preservation of provenance and exactitudes.  Pledging to loosely assemble our many rough applications, we enable everyone –application crafts workers as well as industrial software titans – to fashion an infinite number of coats.

It was invigorating.  First, I got to meet David Cohn, currently of Spot.Us, which fosters community funded reporting that would otherwise go unsupported.  Second, it was the first time that I had ever experienced anything like a newsroom meeting where reporters were attempting to generate story concepts.

That was eye-opening.  A bunch of whip smart people tossing off subjects that desperately need to be covered: the status of SF’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood; the impact of the Recession on not-for-profit services; the regional drop-out rates in the Bay Area from state college systems; innovative sex education sponsored by the public health department; the decline of the independent film making community ... the list grew to fill every corner and every inch of our blackboard.  I was astounded – if you have never experienced what it means to “do journalism” – this was it at its core.  We can’t afford to lose it.

And the project goals are so straightforward.  The project leader, Michael Stoll, referred to a section of that day’s Chronicle where a story of a pet brutality story took lead over the layoff of hundreds of city workers – and the Public Press aims to reset that priority.

There is an explosion of innovation in the world around us.  As those of us who have lost our jobs, or have our jobs threatened, regroup and rethink about what we want to accomplish, the sophistication of our understanding of the larger social, political, and economic trends is not base.  Re-thinking our engagement with our priorities lies at the heart of all of them: the fundamental goals of reporting may not change in themselves, but our enactment of those goals will change.

At the heart of this new journalism is a desire to work with data, and it struck me that a reporter’s quest is increasingly to exploit data sets documenting our government and our lives, many of them public data sets compiled by our local, state, and Federal governments, such as those liberated by Carl Malamud at Public.Resource.Org.  The goal is to weave together these data, associate trends, and tell stories about people, their lives, our societies, by linking data together using simple tools, basic web standards, and engaging visualizations.

As I listened to these reporters conceive new stories, wondering where they could obtain the technical expertise to help them build narratives constructed from linked data, I began to understand something new: all of us – museums, libraries, newspapers, archives – we are all presses now.  We are all working with this explosion of data, some of it our own, some of it (much of it) outside of ourselves; figuring out how to link these data together, or permit others to link it together, so new stories can be told.

We must tell stories for everyone, not just for ourselves.  And for libraries, that means staying away from baroque library standards; weird metadata protocols and data exchange standards that no-one else uses.  It means taking only the best of what we’ve developed, the work that is most flexible and lightweight, such as OpenURL, OAI-PMH, and Dublin Core, and integrating it with RSS and ATOM; OAuth and OpenID; Sitemap and OpenSearch.

Anything that is complicated must be left behind.  Anything that serves only our own needs – such as complex inter-repository sharing – cannot be a priority.  Those needs, important as they remain, must be met more simply.  Most important: exposing as much of our data – stories, reporting, datasets, archives – as we can, and working to enable the integration of other data residing outside ourselves—that is the work of libraries.  Museums.  Archives.  Presses.

Our job is not to deliver packaged information to carefully chosen audiences; our job is to enable information and data to be used by the greatest possible public.

It means libraries not only working among themselves, but making themselves available to journalists in new ways, not merely through their collections, but through their data, through their people and their skills, all working together to enable the telling of stories.  Libraries should reach out to the new generation of public presses, local museums, and archives: not wait to be contacted.  Because we are all presses now.

The new Policy is clearly intended as a unilateral contract, unilaterally imposed on any entity using records from the WorldCat database, including member libraries. While the 1987 guidelines have also served as a unilateral contract—and have much substance in common with the new Policy—the OCLC-member community has not perceived them as such. The [1987] guidelines are both less “unilateral,” in that they grew from a known and more open process of debate, and less “legalistic” in language. With the enormous environmental and technological changes that have occurred in the 22 years (a generation) since the guidelines were introduced, the major differences in tone and language between the guidelines and the new Policy, and a number of significant differences in substance between the two documents, the new Policy cannot be viewed as a mere update describing already accepted practices. The member community has seen the introduction of the new Policy as a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship between OCLC and its member libraries. In the eyes of the community, the guidelines expressed a mutual social contract, and the new Policy represents an authoritarian, unilaterally imposed legal restriction.

The Report goes on to suggest:

The task force applauds OCLC’s recent announcement of delayed policy implementation and the creation of a Review Board on Principles of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship. We hope that the Review Board will consider its timeline and process, as well as its recommendations on policy issues, in light of the analyses and findings of this report. We believe that, using as a base the work done to date on the proposed policy and the issues it raises, a fresh start to policy determination and articulation is desirable.

Strong stuff.

I have not been supportive of OCLC’s recent license assertions.  I think they are a reflection of an out-of-date business model, and certainly did not sufficiently embrace, much less acknowledge, the community zeitgeist that the future rests in service provision and open data access, not data licensing. For that, though, I am sympathetic to how they came into this difficult space, and I understand how and why that decision was made.  OCLC is correct in ascertaining that the data it holds is its primary asset; it erred only in asserting privileges in a manner that better define an era-past, than an era-looming.  However, like all the rest of the world, it faces a hard transition, if it is to survive in this century.

And it is there that I feel more caution must be exercised.  The research library community, particularly, has now smitten OCLC forcefully upon its head with the flat of Library's sword and advised that it must go back to the schoolhouse.  There is a danger of over-reaction in this.  It is one thing to tell OCLC that the community believes its licensing policy was a mistake, its tone too “unilateral” and not conversational, and its process (essentially) pig-headed.  It is another to envelop OCLC’s management in restrictive committee-based decision-making over matters that are vital to its survival; the times demand effective leadership and far-sighted vision; libraries have too long emphasized diplomacy.

Roy Tennant, my ex-colleague, now at OCLC, recently wrote about the challenges of our organizational cultures:

I see no reason why any of our organizations cannot provide the essential ingredient to outrageous success. What is that? I've already given it to you. It's this: where the default is smart and the expectation is learning and the response to problems is finding solutions. Sure, we have plenty more baggage than Google has, but we can still work to get with the program. Unfortunately it isn't simply hyperbole to say our very survival may depend upon it.

He is absolutely correct in this.  OCLC must be engaged in a conversation and reminded of the values of the community, and if the obvious trends in information services form the basis for a clearly articulated strategic re-positioning, preferably one that takes some risks, then it needs to be applauded and set on its way.

Membership organizations are perpetually in self-conflict, torn between conflicting demands, asked to respond to this, and simultaneously to that.  If we, as a community, truly want OCLC to be successful in its effort to enter a network-scaled world, then it must be more nimble, not less; able to act with fewer constraints, not more; and be governed with a board that is tolerant of some error, as long as those errors are acknowledged, forming a basis for the progressive employment of the skills and assets of those who have made their contributions across OCLC’s membership.

OCLC has its own work cut out for it; it must eventually confront a leadership transition, and a stronger internal consensus needs to be forged of its directions and strategic priorities.  Management made mistakes; I have heard them acknowledged.  Those lessons need to form the basis for new action.

As a community, pledged to define a place for re-envisioned library values in a far-different future, we must encourage responsive organizations, not bureaucratically hobbled ones.  Let’s get a move on.