Recently Roy Tennant joined OCLC and explained his reasons for taking this step in a post on the Library Journal: Digital Libraries blog. Roy is someone whom I admire and respect, a visionary and great communicator about technology and libraries. He has done, and continues to do, a huge amount of great things.

When I saw Roy’s posting I decided (maybe foolishly) to write a comment on it (see it here). In that comment I mentioned that while I respected his decision, I didn’t really agree that “OCLC is us” and I used that forum to label OCLC as the Microsoft of the library world. I had also used that characterization in a comment posted to The FRBR Blog a few days before. This drew the ire of at least one OCLC staff member who commented on how easy it was to use labels.

I have thought this way about OCLC for years. It isn’t something new that I came up with recently. To me, OCLC is an entity always to be reckoned with in terms of library technology in the same way that Microsoft is all-pervasive in personal computing generally. That doesn’t mean that all that they do or that their business model as a whole is laudable and always good for libraries. There are other comparisons that seem to fit, including what I think are over-priced services that most libraries seem to blithely accept without critical evaluation of whether they truly meet our needs, a fierce protectiveness of intellectual property that really doesn’t belong to them (in my opinion) in the first place but instead belongs with individual libraries who’ve actually created that intellectual content.

I think there are pros and cons in evaluating OCLC. My position, such as it is, is simply that we as a library community should be wary of monopolies of any sort, that we do not just accept without questioning the premise that OCLC’s approach is the best or in the best interests of libraries, and that we value diversity in terms of options for systems and services available to us in fulfilling the missions of our individual libraries.