Jonathan Rochkind at Bibliographic Wilderness weighs in on the OCLC issue, and ultimately asks a lot of significant questions that don’t have easy answers.
We all need to be asking significant questions, not only of OCLC, SkyRiver, and III, but of the library community, and ultimately ourselves.
A few of my own:
- What is the library community’s relationship with our bibliographic data?
- Is it healthy?
- Do we need to change this relationship?
- How is this affected by our bibliographic data’s relationship with entities outside the greater library community?
- How will it be affected when the depth of information present is found to be much more valuable than is currently recognized?
- Will we be able to adapt when this happens?
Answers sooner rather than later will help us to not only get through the current debate, but to better position ourselves for even greater challenges. We get bonus adaptation and survival points for correct answers, by the way.
