National Library of Sweden Ends Contract with OCLC over Bibliographic Data Use Issue

The National Library of Sweden has ended contract negotiations with OCLC due to the restrictive bibliographic record use policies that OCLC imposes upon WorldCat members. See the National Library of Sweden’s announcement here.

Some time into the negotiations, OCLC presented certain conditions for how bibliographic records taken from WorldCat for cataloguing were to be used in Libris. These conditions could not be accepted by the National Library. A fundamental condition for the entire Libris collaboration is voluntary participation. Libraries that catalogue in Libris can take out all their bibliographic records and incorporate them instead into another system, or use them in anyway the library finds suitable. The National Library makes no claim of controlling how bibliographic records taken from Libris are used.

The announcement asserts that OCLC’s policy for record usage is at odds not only with Libris, the joint catalog of Swedish research and academic libraries, but with Europeana, which serves as a single gateway to digital cultural objects from libraries, archives, and museums from all over Europe (and is a BIG player in linked LAMs data).

This certainly isn’t the first time OCLC’s record use policy has come under fire. For background, iterations of OCLC’s policy statements, and an extensive list of community responses see the OCLC Policy Change wiki page over at Code4Lib.