Our continuing, shared responsibility to protect the unparalleled value of WorldCat
We welcome fair competition. But we must protect and defend WorldCat and OCLC member libraries against any attempt to misuse WorldCat records. Recently, we were forced to file suit against Baker & Taylor and its subsidiary Bridgeall Libraries Ltd. to stop wrongfully providing WorldCat records in their competitive BTCat service.
We have partnered with and respected Baker & Taylor in the past. But their current actions cross a clear line. They are encouraging libraries to disregard their legal obligations to OCLC and to each other by constructing BTCat—not through their own efforts, but by using WorldCat records and OCLC resources. Despite our repeated requests to Baker & Taylor to cease this conduct, we are now left with no choice but to initiate legal action to protect the integrity of WorldCat.
WorldCat is a remarkable achievement in global collaboration that we all have a responsibility to protect. For nearly 60 years, OCLC metadata experts, libraries, and many others have contributed, enhanced, improved, and shared bibliographic data to connect cultural and scholarly resources in libraries worldwide. WorldCat also represents a significant and ongoing investment by OCLC and the library community.
OCLC stands with and for libraries, which is why we’ve taken the step of filing suit to protect WorldCat, OCLC, and our member libraries worldwide.
For more information about this suit, please review the filing.
Protecting shared infrastructure
WorldCat is a remarkable achievement in global collaboration that we all have a responsibility to protect. For nearly 60 years, OCLC metadata experts, libraries, and many others have contributed, enhanced, improved, and shared bibliographic data to connect cultural and scholarly resources in libraries worldwide. WorldCat also represents a significant and ongoing investment by OCLC and the community.
OCLC provides servers and computing power to store billions of records, along with the technology to search those records and display results to users worldwide in milliseconds. There’s also investment in infrastructure—such as security monitoring and disaster recovery—to ensure that WorldCat is accessible now and in the future. But OCLC provides more than IT support. Expert contributors work with data science models and even artificial intelligence tools to increase quality at scale—with tangible benefits to libraries. In just the last year, more than 518 million holdings records were enhanced, with more than 14 million records enhanced through data science and artificial intelligence. The result? Better discoverability and faster fulfillment times through interlibrary loan.
14+ million
holdings enhanced through data science in the last several months
BTCat relies on WorldCat records to be a viable, usable data set. But Baker & Taylor’s actions will lead to a weakened WorldCat, less competition, and increased prices. Damage to WorldCat diminishes everything we’ve worked cooperatively to build, including improved cataloging, resource sharing, discovery, collection and library management, and other services that thousands of libraries and their users rely on every day.
Innovation for all libraries
WorldCat isn’t just a place for individual libraries to write and store MARC records. Ongoing collaboration is what makes it powerful. More than 90 percent of the time, a cataloging record is the result of OCLC, publishers, and libraries coming together to add their unique metadata expertise. In fact, OCLC has spent approximately $5 million during the past two years and $170 million during the past seven years developing and enhancing library bibliographic records and associated metadata. Thanks to advances in data science and artificial intelligence, OCLC found and resolved more than 5.4M duplicate records in WorldCat in just the last 12 months.
Working with data experts from around the globe, every single day we together create richer descriptions in records, which improves the discoverability for researchers and other library users. This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the same way. And all libraries benefit from this collaborative work.
90+%
of records enhanced by experts
“Accurate holdings increase efficiency for management tasks, improve resource sharing results, and enable discovery at the point‐of‐need.”
Gina Winkler
OCLC Executive Director of Metadata and Digital Services
Sustainability for the future
If Baker & Taylor continues building a competitive service using WorldCat and OCLC’s resources, WorldCat investments will decline as revenue declines, and the very records that BTCat depends on will no longer be available in the same way they are today. This will lead to operational issues in many libraries.
It’s our shared responsibility to preserve the viability and value of WorldCat for future generations. Participants commit to respecting the contributions of every library. The rights and responsibilities associated with WorldCat are promises that every member library makes to preserve the integrity of WorldCat as the world‐class library resource.