The Rogue Scholar

RLG to Combine with OCLC

Just received this tidbit (which is a pretty major tidbit) from Kathleen Gundrum, the Director of Member Services at Nylink:

RLG to combine with OCLC

Combined programs and services to advance offerings and drive efficiencies for libraries, archives, museums and other research organizations worldwide

DUBLIN, Ohio, May 3, 2006—Two of the world’s largest membership-based information organizations have agreed to come together.  The combined organization will offer an integrated product and service line, and will give libraries, archives and museums new leverage in developing services, standards and software that will help them support research and disseminate knowledge online.

The RLG Board of Directors and OCLC Board of Trustees have recommended that the two service and research organizations be combined effective July 1, 2006.  If approved by RLG member institutions, RLG’s online products and services will be integrated with OCLC products and services, and RLG’s program initiatives will be brought forward as a new division of OCLC Programs and Research.

A combined organization would provide an opportunity to leverage program strengths, services and innovative research initiatives, and to deliver more value to a greater number of libraries, museums, archives and other research organizations around the globe.

RLG is a nonprofit organization of over 150 research libraries, archives, museums and other cultural memory institutions that designs and delivers innovative information discovery services, organizes collaborative programs, and takes an active role in creating and promoting relevant standards and practices.  OCLC Online Computer Library Center is a nonprofit, membership, library service and research organization whose public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing library costs dominate its plans and activities.  OCLC provides computer-based cataloging, reference, resource sharing, eContent, preservation services and research to 54,000 libraries in 109 countries.

“The last few years have instilled in us all an urgent need to find innovative, cost-effective and compelling ways to bring research collections into the heart of the online environment and into the hands of those who can benefit from them,” said James Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University, and Chair of the RLG Board of Directors.  “It is time that RLG and OCLC take united action if we are to realize our long-held and long-shared mutual goal of providing information to people when and where they need it.  New challenges demand new thinking, so after deliberation and careful thought, both RLG and OCLC came to the conclusion that the best way to serve our members’ interests was to combine forces.”

“The OCLC Board of Trustees and OCLC management believe that it is in the best interests of the library and cultural heritage community in general, and the research library community in particular, for RLG and OCLC to create a united organization that leverages our respective strengths,” said Betsy Wilson, Dean of University Libraries, University of Washington, and Chair, OCLC Board of Trustees.  “We must work together, so that in the years to come, the people and institutions we serve will point to our alliance as a signal achievement in advancing research, scholarship and education.”

RLG’s program initiatives would be continued as RLG-Programs, a new division of OCLC Programs and Research that would provide programs to support architecture, standards development and best practices, to name a few.

James Michalko, who currently leads RLG, would serve as Vice President of RLG-Programs Development, working under the leadership of Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President of Research and OCLC Chief Strategist.  RLG-Programs would remain a membership-based organization.  Its agenda would be shaped by the needs of its members and guided by a dedicated Program Council. 

“RLG-Programs will continue RLG’s successful tradition of identifying issues and building consensus among research institutions,” said Mr. Michalko.  “When combined with OCLC’s research capacities and robust prototyping capabilities, RLG-Programs will transform collaborative activity for our member institutions.  Through RLG-Programs initiatives, staff from member institutions will work together to gain and share competence in the use of new technologies, contribute to the development of new standards, and collectively improve the ability of researchers to find and use the rich collections that members manage on their behalf.”

RLG’s online products and services would be integrated with OCLC service offerings as appropriate.  The potential for increased services and consolidation of costs would result in overall savings.  For example, RLIN, the RLG Union Catalog, would be integrated into WorldCat, delivering economies of scale and reach that would benefit members of both RLG and OCLC. 

Both organizations are committed to providing seamless, high-quality services and service levels.  Any change in RLG service offerings will be announced well in advance.

Approval of the agreement requires the assent of two-thirds of voting RLG member institutions.  Voting will conclude in early June.  RLG-Programs would maintain an office in Mountain View, California.  Staffing decisions will be made in the weeks leading up to the proposed transition.

“We know that the RLG membership shares with the OCLC membership a conviction to deliver access to the world’s information,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO.  “Together, we can deliver enhanced solutions that collect, organize, preserve and provide access to information, not just for today, but for future generations.”

Nylink promises to keep the updates coming, and as I get them, I'll post them here.

David Englin Speaks

This is not strictly a matter for librarians (not all of them anyway), but in the spirit of Presidents’ Day, here’s a recent speech delivered on the floor of the

Commonwealth of

Virginia House of Delegates by David Englin (D-45). He quotes President Washington, whose birthday we celebrate today; and nothing in his speech, I suspect, would have drawn anything but approval from President Lincoln, whose birthday we also celebrate, were he alive today.

In The News

And now, a bunch of pretty decent links:

This week's favorite line from Techsploitation Chick: "The[rehashed dot.com companies such as] Zupits suck up funding, while true visionaries innovate for free."  Not a bad thing to keep in mind in this age of big companies who want us to use their metadata in ways they determine with minimal imput from us. Controlled vocabularies are nice, but the price for their use is  sometimes quite high. And huge, ostensibly metadata-friendly ILS systems with their myriad add-on services are rarely as customizable as those who sell them to us would have us believe. Anyway, read the whole thing here.

A major event in the "Woo-Hoo!" department is the Academy's Grey Literature Report being written up in ResourceShelf.   We even made Resource of the Week! (Yea!) Granted, we're not the only repositories of Grey lit to be found with a bit of effort, but I still think we have one of the bst. But, what do I know? I merely catalog the stuff that goes into the report every couple of months.

Here's a kind of creepy revelation from The Nation magazine:  "The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online."  (The full article is here.)

Another related story on the same issue is here, from the NY Times.  Should something like this go through (unlikely but always possible) how does one get the service of an ISP overseas? Assuming, of course, that this law would apply only to access points within the continental USA? Something to think about.

Here's something else to think about. Granted, it's a tiny bit dated, but I think "just plain insiring" is a good description.

Katrina News Source Update

This is from the NYAM Info Notes blog:

NIEHS Launches Website with global info system for assessing environmental hazards from Hurricane Katrina    

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH
NIH News
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday, September 9, 2005
CONTACT: Christine Bruske, 919-541-3665, rmackar@niehs.nih.gov
NIEHS LAUNCHES WEBSITE WITH GLOBAL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR ASSESSING
ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS FROM HURRICANE KATRINA

N'Awlins vs. Katrina

There's already tons of material available on the web regarding  New Orleans vs. Katrina, so I won't post it here.  Except for a few choice tidbits that I found:

SciGuy's science blog had these immortal (and not a littl creepy considering how things turned out) words from Mark Twain words about Men Vs. The Mississippi River.

Dottie Hiebing recently posted this note from Ray LaFever of the New York State Archives  this message on METRO-L:

"The damage/destruction to cultural and historical institutions in Louisiana pales next to the incredible human suffering, but we worry about them none-the-less.   The American Association of Museums is developing pages on its website to report on museums affected by Hurricane Katrina and recovery efforts."

One thing I noticed over the weekend trying to locate resources on the library collections in the city is that 90% of their websites were simply not responding to queries. That's starting to change now as servers come back online but it'll probably be a while before they're back in force. I did hear that the staff of Tulane U. moved most of the first floor collection onto upper floors in the building before the waters came, and Cornell U. has been helping them out. Inside Higher Ed News has a bit more on Katrina-displaced students.

Actually, most of the on-line articles I've found have to do with the hit the U.S. economy will take because of the wrecked oil rigs in the Gulf Region . . . they generally ignore the real point, though which is that New Orleans is the biggest port in the United States. I'll say it again: New Orleans is the biggest port in the United States. George Friedman points out just what that implies for our active living lives even here on the east coast.

House Blocks a Provision for Patriot Act Inquiries

The U.S. House of Representatives appears to have done something positive this year. (Librarians, celebrate!) Now to see what the Senate (which is much less devoted to privacy and liberty these days) does with the bill. The full story from the NY Times is behind the link.

I'm going over my notes from the NYLink class from the day before yesterday--I'll have that up later today. For the moment, I'll just note that Connexion 1.3 (which is the current version as of March 2005) works very much like CatME, but rather slower: Connexion scans an Oracle database instead of OCLC's. Still, if you're used to CatME, you should have few problems making the transition in the next few weeks.

For History Buffs and Researchers

Military Personnel Records
Source: National Archives and Records Administration

Opening of Military Personnel Records and Archival Research Room "Opening the Door" to the National Archives in St. Louis

"At 11 AM on Saturday, June 11, 2005, the National Archives National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis will formally open the records of Charles Lindbergh, President John F. Kennedy, General George S. Patton, Steve McQueen, Clark Gable, and Jackie Robinson, among others.... For the first time, nearly 1.2 million official military personnel files of former US Navy and Marine Corps enlisted personnel who served between 1885 and 1939 will be open to the public. This first opening also includes 150 'persons of exceptional prominence', including former Presidents, famous military leaders, celebrities, entertainers and professional athletes who served in the military and have been deceased for at least 10 years."

Librarian Stands Up to FBI

Librarian Stands up to FBI

I'm not going to comment on this. I don't think I need to comment, except to quote:

"I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group. They are subversive. You think they are just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're, like, plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them."

Thank you, Michael Moore.

Civil Liberties and Google Scholar

I know I promised to post a bunch of stuff on the Civil Liberties workshop run by METRO and Brooklyn College, and I will. Tomorrow. But it's also MLA in San Antonio, Texas this week, which means that my bosses are all out of the office, which leaves me in charge of the Tech Services department at the Academy. If that's not enough to frighten you, I'm not sure what is.

In any case, it means my lunch hour doesn't stretch as far as once it did, so I have to compose and post everything that gets sent here from my apartment. Which, I want to point out, I was perfectly willing to do, except that my notes from the conference inevitably found their ways into my desk at work which means that I waltzed out of the building to my weekly tutoring job without taking them out of the desk.

Details. Bah!

In the meantime, I just got done reading how Ex Libris is going to mate SFX with Google Scholar . . . but I'm no further toward understanding how they're going to do this now than I was when Google made the announcement. I have no doubt that Google can do what they say the intend to do, but I still wonder if they haven't seriously underestimated just how much work and money they'll have to invest to make it happen. Time, as they say, will tell.

Anyway, tomorrow, I write about last week's conference. I promise.

Something to Think About

The quasi-political rant below the link is something I posted on my Livejournal account earlier. I hadn't really planned to talk about Terri Schiavo . . . I'd intended to write about Google (and I did . . . sort of), because Google Scholar is a big deal to me, mostly because I can't imagine how they'll bring it online on time and on budget. The copyright issues alone are staggering, and the XML is no less daunting to think about. At any rate, I started writing and it went somewhere I hadn't planned on. I know this is a library blog (or it's supposed to be) but there's no rule against being a librarian and having an opinion about something. The trick is not for us to never have opinions, but to not let our opinions interfere with our willingness or ability to find an answer to someone's question. Even if we don't agree with their politics. I suspect that's a hard beam to balance on, and since I don't work the reference desk at the Academy I don't have to worry about it often. Still, it remains something to think about.