It's just not enough for OCLC to grab up good software, create cool new tools, and be the behemoth of the library world; they have to snatch up some great librarians to go along with it!

Last month, Karen Calhoun, senior associate university librarian for information technology and technical services at Cornell University Library, left her post to become vice president for OCLC WorldCat and Metadata Services. Yesterday, it was announced that Roy Tennant will be leaving the California Digital Library (CDL), where he has worked since 2000, for a new position at OCLC. Tennant will be senior program manager with the RLG Programs unit of OCLC Research and Programs, reporting to Jim Michalko.

Calhoun's position was part of a larger reorganization at OCLC "designed to achieve global integration of services provided by the world’s largest library cooperative." Though there were no formal press releases on some of the other changes, you can see them in some of the new titles of the executive management in Dublin. Chip Nilges is now vice president, New Services (the partner stuff); Mike Teets is vice president, Global Product Architecture (the product-focused software development stuff), and Robin Murray is vice president, Global Product Management (the stuff stuff). Murray, you might recall, was CEO of Fretwell-Downing before it was acquired by OCLC PICA. There are surely other changes that have happened, but these are the ones I know about for sure.

This is surely bitter news for Cornell and CDL, and as Roy says, bitter-sweet for him. OCLC continues to impress with an upper- and middle-management staff that truly seems to get what is going on in the world. Their grappling with changes was likely part of the decision to launch a governance study of the organization. The focus of the study seems to be on the internationalization of OCLC.

"As OCLC becomes an increasingly global cooperative, we need to adjust our governance to ensure representation and participation by our members around the world," said Lizabeth Wilson, chair, OCLC Board of Trustees and dean of university libraries, University of Washington. "This study will review and evaluate current and alternative governance forms for OCLC. The committee will recommend a governance structure appropriate to the roles that OCLC is expected to carry out in the next decade."

This study, as well as the organization changes occurring, should be fun to watch in the coming months. Congratulations to Karen and Roy on their new positions—you have joined OCLC in what are most certainly interesting times.

Nothing major really striking my fancy, but there has been a smattering of interesting news on the library technology front in the last couple of weeks.

Free-gle Scholar
Some scholarly societies are launching something that is either a counter to or a target for Google Scholar. Scitopia.org will launch this summer and include 3 million articles from 13 scholarly societies. The jury has not even gathered yet since it's only April and the site will not launch until June, so I am left only to complain at this point that I don't have any great love for press releases that tell me something is coming in two months, but I cannot see it yet.

Nevertheless, the list of societies is impressive. The service looks to be similar to Elsevier's Scirus and the CiteSeer search engine hosted by Penn State. All three have one of my web pet peeves in common—a URL that has to be spelled when spoken. No one has to spell Google, Amazon, or OCLC.

Making the World Smaller
Speaking of OCLC (no, no more jokes)...the collaborative has just announced a pilot for a scoped version of the WorldCat Catalog, dubbed "WorldCat Local."

Through a locally branded interface, the service will provide libraries the ability to search the entire WorldCat database and present results beginning with items most accessible to the patron. These might include collections from the home library, collections shared in a consortium, and open access collections.

WorldCat Local will offer the same feature set as WorldCat.org, such as a single search box, relevancy ranking of search results, result sets that bring multiple versions of a work together under one record, faceted browse capability, citation formatting options, cover art, and additional evaluative content.

Worldcat Local can also be hooked up to resource sharing applications to facilitate reciprocal borrowing or interlibrary loan. Pilot partners include the University of Washington, the Peninsular Library System in California, and several libraries in Illinois.

With this, OCLC is one step closer to asking all libraries more seriously, "Who needs their own local OPAC?"

My NextGen Catalog
And this just in...Aquabrowser is adding personalization features to its catalog interface. Called My Discoveries^TM, the new 2.0-ness allows for publishable resource lists, tagging, and the creation of personal profiles.

I think LibraryThing is getting more and more interesting, too. A sneak peek at Tim Spalding's Computers in Libraries presentation is on his blog. Tim kindly stepped in for me at the last minute to co-present with Roy Tennant when I could not make it to CIL this year for the first time in several years (thanks, Tim!). I was already hearing great reviews of Tim's Wednesday presentation before the day even ended, and I'm sure it was more refreshing than my ad nauseam attacks on public catalogs. It's good to remember that facets, word clouds, and better relevance don't make an online catalog "2.0" per se. The social aspects will be the clincher in that regard.

At a recent conference, I was having a conversation with one of the luminaries of library and information science education. We were debating a discussion from the library blogosphere. When I asked what his students thought, he replied somewhat glibly, "Students don't read library blogs." Ouch. You mean, they're not hanging on our every word? What about our poignant insights? I felt like a tree that falls in the forest only to be heard by the other trees.

But maybe some vendors can save the biblioblogosphere (are we still calling it that, cuz boy, it's hard to type, let alone say). Perhaps in an effort to counter complaints about the authority of blogs, or maybe just because blogs are cool, database aggregators are starting to include blog content in their databases. Of course, I don't even know how many library blogs are in the list, so it might not apply to us at all. The "Information Science" category at Newstex looks sadly sparse.

EBSCO recently announced Full-Text Blog Content with Historical Archive from Newstex. PR superlatives had LexisNexis firing back in one of those fun but relatively inconsequential vendor skirmishes (I like to call these "battle of the press release"). LexisNexis announced a partnership with Newstex almost a year earlier. Whatever. O.K. It's cool that blogs are being added.

You may recall the discussion on the list starting in February about the Newstex blogs that have been on LexisNexis Academic since late last year. I’m writing now because a somewhat exaggerated press release has been put out on the PR wires regarding EBSCO and Newstex. Specifically, the press release states that the EBSCO arrangement is unique and that EBSCO is the first to bring this content to academic researchers. I would like to reassure you that there has been no change to LexisNexis coverage of Newstex or to the space-time continuum.
—from Alistair Morrison, Product Manager, LexisNexis Academic, in an e-mail on the LNAcademic discussion list

Unlike existing Web-based blog aggregation services, Newstex actually licenses influential blog content directly from independent bloggers and then takes in each carefully selected blog feed in text format and uses its proprietary NewsRouter technology to scan it in real-time. The resulting blog feeds, news feeds, and historical archives are delivered to EBSCO for distribution to customers in applicable databases.
—from the EBSCOhost Press Release

But my issue has a different scope. I can tell the difference between a blog and a magazine or journal article (in format, at least, if not in content). But has anyone noticed that it's getting a little harder to distinguish between a blog and a website? It's like back in the old days when we used to call a "portal" a "homepage."

When I'm looking for information, I suddenly feel like a library patron who is forced to search one silo for books and another for articles. Why do I search "the Web" with one search box and blogs with another? What does that say about blogs? Before people start yelling "user error!"—yes, I know that the "more" link in the Google search results includes Google Blog Search, and I know that I can add Technorati to the dropdown of my Firefox search box. The whole thing just got me thinking about the parallel with the clichéd "library silo" problem.

I don't mean to throw fuel on the vendor spat. I think vendors and PR departments make more of these sorts of things than customers ever do. And I like the PR folk at EBSCO and LexisNexis. At some point, maybe there will be a study published by the Surgeon General stating that blogs are a proven cause of high blood pressure. Until ego inflation and deflation are recognized as diseases, it is our only hope.

"Fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."

—President George W. Bush

I'm not usually one for meta-blogging (blog posts that refer to other posts on that blog), but I gotta make an exception this week. When one does a lot of writing it can often become somewhat monotonous. The writing is less monotonous when the author enjoys the exercise. This is why writing last weekend's post about Google buying OCLC was so much fun. Yes, it was a joke. I hope no one out there is still wondering. I noticed that some people didn't think it was funny. I'm not exactly sure why. Was it too conceivable? Too much of an inside joke?

I'm not inclined to defend what I thought was a pretty good joke, but I will tell you why I thought the process itself was fun.

1. The actual writing. I wish I were funny enough (or at least had enough humor stamina) to write for The Onion every day. As I like to joke when I give presentations, humor makes up for substance every time.


2. The group effort. Yes, there was quite a bit of collusion going on the week before April Fool's Day. ALA Techsource editors and yours truly wanted to have some fun. How far could we go? Would our overseers approve?


3. The complicity. I was not about to quote real people in a fake story without getting their approval. Guess what, folks—the people at OCLC have a sense of humor! Yes, it's true! In fact, some of those lines I used in the quotes were actually given to me by Ralph LeVan at OCLC. (I will protect him by not disclosing which ones. I will also protect him, others, and myself by not disclosing the ones I rejected!) My editors (bless them) were also in on the joke. If you don't think the folks at American Libraries have a sense of humor, then you haven't seen their addition to YouTube. My great grandmother always told me that if you can't laugh at yourself, you are not entitled to laugh at anyone.


4. Factishness (different from Truthiness). Admit it, you thought for at least a moment that it could have been real. Shoot, I thought it could be while I was making it up.


5. The break from it all. Some of the library IT news has been a little bleak and disconcerting these days. The FUD factor (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) requires that we all have a chance to lighten up a little, eh?

So, I hope y'all thought it was funny. I'm sorry if you didn't. At least as the man said, "You can't get fooled again."

What do you get when the 800-pound gorilla mates with the elephant in the room? Well, it looks as though you might just get the OCLC division of Google, Inc. The Mountain View, California, search giant has announced that it will acquire 100% of OCLC, the library cooperative based in Dublin, Ohio. The news was reported today on the ALA TechSource blog.

The news should come as a shock to the library community, which has waffled for several years between loathing their supposed competition and acquiescing to Google's leading position in the search market. On the other hand, libraries should be rejoicing at the implied value that Google has placed on the fruits of library labor.

Details of the deal are sketchy, and an official press release has not been issued. The real surprise would have to be the compliance of OCLC's Board of Trustees in making such a deal. While I could not reach any of them on a weekend, I was able to reach a few friends and colleagues in Ohio.

Ralph LeVan, senior research scientist for OCLC, expressed confidence that OCLC research staff would "rejuvenate the fledgling full-text division in Mountain View."

Jay Jordan could not be reached for comment from his reportedly remote location somewhere in the Caribbean, but Mike Teets, vice president for Global Product Architecture said, "The staff who will remain with the OCLC division are pretty excited about moving someplace with sunshine."

Chip Nilges, yet another V.P. at the library powerhouse, was more reflective, saying only, "I wonder what they're gonna do with this old mausoleum."

A source at Google who did not want to be identified said, "We're looking forward to finally having enough librarians on staff to catalog all those web pages." What does "tongue-in-cheek" sound like over the phone?

Frankly, I don't know what to make of all this. The combination of Google's full-text initiatives with OCLC's century's worth of metadata could make for some interesting products. Throw in the companies that OCLC has acquired over the last few years, and you could have the foundation for GoogleILS, GoogleResolver, GoogleERM, GoogleSelfcheck, or simply GoogleLibrary. Lipstick, wig, and heels on a pig.

"I suppose your father lost his job to a robot. I don't know, maybe you would have simply banned the internet to keep the libraries open."
—Bruce Greenwood to Will Smith in the movie I, Robot

The board has not gone public yet, but other well-known librarians are already starting to react. Susan Gibbons, associate dean at the University of Rochester Libraries, commented, "When you really stop to think about it, [the acquisition] was inevitable. Just imagine the improvements that Google will be able to make to its search algorithms by mining all of OCLC's holdings data."

Roy Tennant echoed Gibbons with some added impatience. "What took them so long?" he said when I reached him in California late last night. "How could any company that purports to 'provide access to the world's information' do it without libraries?" added Tennant. "Or at least, how could they do it without getting all our stuff?"

Rumors and predictions of Google's steady takeover have been around a while...I just thought it would take longer for them to go after libraries like this. One question I still have is "Where's our cut?" I was thinking about the billion-dollar stock deal that YouTube got and felt a little jealous. A fool and his money are soon parted, but lucky to get together in the first place. A fool and his senses may never even pass each other in the hallway.