OCLC's slogan is literally "Because what is known must be shared". Them being a litigative gatekeeper is mighty hypocritical.
I don't really get their dilemma. They claim that a publicly available copy of the data on Anna’s Archive is a direct threat to their business. But the same data is freely available by going to their own worldcat.org. Any library that was satisfied with pure read access to the data was already not going to pay them money.
They allege that scraping the 2.2TB of data cost them $5 million over 2 years. That's $2 per megabyte. If the cost of providing this was the only issue surely within those two years someone would have gotten the idea to just put up an XML dump for download, or to shoot Anna's Archive an email with an offer to just send them the data as soon as it became clear that it was them.
> In November 2008, the Board of Directors of OCLC unilaterally issued a new Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records[66] that would have required member libraries to include an OCLC policy note on their bibliographic records; the policy caused an uproar among librarian bloggers.[67][68] Among those who protested the policy was the non-librarian activist Aaron Swartz, who believed the policy would threaten projects such as the Open Library, Zotero, and Wikipedia, and who started a petition to "Stop the OCLC powergrab".
and
> OCLC acquired NetLibrary, a provider of electronic books and textbooks, in 2002 and sold it in 2010 to EBSCO Industries.[54] OCLC owns 100% of the shares of OCLC PICA, a library automation systems and services company which has its headquarters in Leiden in the Netherlands and which was renamed "OCLC" at the end of 2007.[55] In July 2006, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) merged with OCLC.
My theory is that OCLC expanded outside of Ohio, and then the bureaucracy expanded to the point where it became self sustaining. It accidentally merged with monopolistic strains from The Netherlands and is now no different from the other knowledge ransoming entities, also in The Netherlands.
> Prichard held executive positions with LexisNexis from 1995 to 2003. As vice president, he focused on business information and risk management solutions for corporations, libraries, and other organizations.[4]
> Prichard was general manager and senior vice president of sales and marketing at ProQuest Information and Learning, a global publisher and information provider, from April 2003 to October 2005.[4] From October 2005 to April 2007, he served as president and CEO of ProQuest.
Suing Anna's Archive and similar product, eg being the lapdogs of big publishers, it seems. Why else would they care if they had no shared interests with them?
MAybe I am missing a way to use their database that makes sense, but for me worldcat is pinterest-level and other SEO-pollution on my search results when I need to find some real information. I do not care if this book is in some library 1000km away. If I need a book I will search in my local ones. Never understood what is the point in what worldcat does but maybe others use it in some way useful to them.
Good question. The internet is full of lies, but it suggests that Papua New Guinea ranks at the bottom since it only has one and that was a gift from Australia.
Sharing is the best thing that can happen to knowledge. It is great that gatekeepers lose money over this.
However, the blame of the loss might burden oclc, which might have been doing a positive job.
https://www.oclc.org/en/about.html