Mod 2: Related Blog

Through Google's blog search, I found a blog called Bibliographic Wilderness. The author discusses a variety of library-related issues, including cataloging. He presents information without becoming too technical; another blog I looked at, Catalogablog, was cataloging-oriented but so technical and specific that without having taken cataloging classes, I had no idea what he was talking about. Bibliographic Wilderness, on the other hand, is much more accessible and understandable. In the following quote, the author discusses the relationship between cataloging and copyright; I deal with copyright permission for electronic reserves on an almost daily basis in my job, so I found it interesting.

Assume for the sake of argument that there is some copyright inherent in a cataloging record (a not at all clear thing).

If any or all of a cataloging record does possess copyright, then it is of course held by the institution doing the cataloging, unless they assign it elsewhere.

In the case of LC, as part of the federal government nothing they do has copyright in the US.

In the case of large libraries doing original cataloging, I think it is in all of their collective interests to release this putatively copyrighted data into the public domain, in an exersize in mutual reciprocity.

Why do we share cataloging in the first place?

Isn’t that kind of mutual reciprocity exactly why libraries do cooperative cataloging in the first place, the very endeavor that gave rise to the regional ‘bibliographic utility’ of which OCLC is the only one left standing (in the US anyway)?

Libraries aren’t submitting their original cataloging to OCLC for the paltry sums OCLC ‘pays’ (ie credits) them for it; and they aren’t submitting it to OCLC in an attempt to help OCLC gain a monopoly on this information for their own business purposes. They’re submitting it, as they always have been, in order to freely share with other libraries in a collective endeavor of mutual reciprocity.