You can selectively harvest based on date ranges and other criteria. See: http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html#SelectiveHarvestingandDatestamps

And if your OAI server is flexible enough, you can come up with all manner of virtual feeds to cater to whims.

I don’t like OAI-PMH as a protocol much, being a re-invention of some wheels. But it is mature enough and so widely adopted that it has become a de-facto standard. And that is often the best ones.

I’m not sure OAI-PMH is the best way to get records, but perhaps. Is there any way to limit your OAI-PMH (or any other API) feed to only certain records, and/or only records that have been modified since X date?

I’m not sure OCLC sees it that way. The OCLC records policy certainly makes it seem to me they are doing everything they can to maintain their monopoly.

Please note, because some people mis-read me, I am not encouraging anyone to stop submitting records to WorldCat. In fact, I am encouraging people to share their records far and wide in _as many_ places as possible. What bothers me about WorldCat’s attempt to control all our records is that it places _limits_ on sharing. I’d never stop sharing my records and holdings with WorldCat–so long as I was allowed to share them with others too. The more the merrier.

I said:

“But I would guess WorldCat needs to have persons using them for all functions in order for them to remain useful and viable.”

I should be more careful. I wasn’t thinking people need to exclusively use WorldCat. But the fact of the matter is if certain, committed people do not loyally and selflessly produce many records for WorldCat, there will be fewer and fewer records that people can download. I think that many institutions do not put much in but get a lot out of it.

It’s not clear to me what legal action OCLC could take against LibLime, if they have any legal basis whatsoever to try and stop them. I can’t think of any. There’s no law that says you can’t compete with OCLC.

Nathan, what makes you say that WorldCat can’t be useful and valuable to it’s customers unless it’s the _only_ service it’s customers use for copy cataloging? Of course, that’s already not true, many OCLC members already buy cataloging records from various for-profit vendors, in addition to using WorldCat for copy cataloging.

I don’t see any reason OCLC needs a monopoly to stay useful and valuable.

a) Takes legal action against LibLime
or
b) Makes an offer to purchase LibLime

I would be quite surprised if they have not inquired about option b yet.

Great write up. Thank you. VERY INTERESTING stuff here.

“The other barrier to harnessing more of our collective data to improve our cooperative cataloging quality is technological/workflow. We need software supporting cataloging workflow that both automatically sends changes to the shared store, and automatically downloads any new changes to one’s local catalog. It can’t be an extra step to submit or fetch corrected and enhanced records, we need the machines to do this for us.”

Jonathan – do you know if it can give reports everyday of records that have been updated and has an “opt out” option for individual record improvements?

If so, I can see this being very useful – if not, perhaps it could become a nuisance and unwieldy.

“I can think of various scenarios for using biblios.net and Worldcat together, but I’m not really an expert in current cataloging workflows.”

But I would guess WorldCat needs to have persons using them for all functions in order for them to remain useful and viable.

It seems to me that this move might force some OCLC changes that otherwise would be much slower in coming…

~Nathan