Saturday, February 27, 2010

OCLC putting Squeeze on MSU?

Karen Coyle has an interesting (and alarming) post on OCLC's punishing treatment of Michigan State University after the MSU Library chose SkyRiver over WorldCat for its cataloging operations. It appears that even after MSU's switch, the Library still wanted to contribute records back to WorldCat for ILL purposes and expected to pay the advertised rate of $0.23 per record. In fact, OCLC wanted to charge the equivalent of $2.85 per record. This was unaffordable and led MSU's Clifford Haka to write, "While we will continue with OCLC for ILL, I regret that our newer holdings will not be available for others to consult." Coyle remarks: "I find it astonishing at any corporation would choose to punish customers rather to work to with them back. I also find it astonishing that OCLC is willing to keep current customers through threats in fear." Worth reading her full post.

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