Global Collaboration and the Future of the OCLC Cooperative
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPPresentation at the OCLC Members Council Meeting in Quebec City on February 6, 2007*
I was originally asked to attend this Members Council program to provide an update on our progress in advancing RLG programs as part of OCLC. Then your president, Ernie Ingles, contacted me and indicated that this was not acceptable and that a talk exploring the future of the organization and its strategic and global role was required. A relatively comfortable and innocent assignment became this challenging and provocative treatise.
I was born professionally, like many in this audience, during the infancy of OCLC in the late 1960s and 1970s. You know what they say about those wonderful years—if you remember them, you weren't there. We have lived through OCLC's adolescence and now its full maturity as a global enterprise serving the library community's voracious appetite for cost-effective access to worldwide information. I have been involved, like you, in its regional networks. I have served on and chaired its Research Libraries Advisory Council. I addressed the Members Council in 1993 when the most controversial topic was boxed wine at the receptions. I fought OCLC as part of the "Save MARC" group during the battle over the copyrighting of the database. And now I chair the board committee on RLG Programs and serve on the RLG Program Council. Clearly, we all have OCLC in our professional genes and see our success as libraries serving our communities as intimately bundled up in OCLC's vitality and relevance. As Martin Buber once noted, we no longer just stand side by side, but with one another.
My plan this afternoon is to outline briefly a context for my ideas and then to describe a series of things that I want from OCLC: first, I will identify the things I want OCLC to [End Page 263] watch and observe with more intensity; second, I will list the things that I want OCLC to sense and feel with more passion; and then third, I will enumerate the things that I want OCLC to commit to and to do with more investment.
One of my favorite films is Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part 1. There is a classic scene when Brooks, playing Moses, is coming down the mountain carrying three large stone tablets. He yells, "Children of Israel, I have 15…"—and he trips, and one of the tablets crashes to the ground. He picks himself up and proceeds down the mountain. "Children of Israel, I have 10 commandments." Such is the history of social change. So, Members Council delegates, I have 24 suggestions for OCLC's observation, sensitivity, and action as this global cooperative grows in its impact and reach.
First, some context. The late newscaster Charles Kuralt once noted that, thanks to the interstate highway system in the United States, one can travel from New York to San Francisco and see absolutely nothing. The technology and information infrastructure upon which we rely is necessary but insufficient. Our users tell us, often very clearly, what they want: more and better content, more and better access, convenience, new capabilities, cost moderation if not reduction, personal control, and enhanced individual and organizational productivity.
Libraries of all types continue to advance core roles in information acquisition, synthesis, navigation, dissemination, interpretation, understanding, and archiving. But the focus on get, organize, find, deliver, answer, learn, and preserve is being extended as libraries assume new and often schizophrenic roles as consumers, aggregators, publishers, educators, research and development organizations, entrepreneurs, and policy advocates.
Libraries of all types are being challenged to manage shifting values and to respond to critical trends. It was the former CEO of OCLC, K. Wayne Smith, who provided me with the best definition of trends. In 1996, there were 4,963 Elvis impersonators working in the United States; and, by 2006, that number had increased to 27,206...
