OAIster and OCLC

This week I found a blog entry that was actually on topic! In HangingTogether, the OCLC/RLG blog, the entry OAIster Update: More Access & No Conditions explains more about the impending changes to the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) as OCLC takes over stewardship of the mass of metadata harvested from OAI-compliant repositories. As a background, "OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open archive digital resources that was built by harvesting from open archive collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)." Previously supported by the University of Michigan, the size of the aggregation of records became too large for UM to single-handedly care for. Enter OCLC.

In reviewing some of the older blog posts about this transition (in September), it seems there was a slight kerfluffle about the whole thing. OCLC originally laid out the plan as such:

• Continued collaboration with University of Michigan.
• Records will be freely discoverable along with all other content in WorldCat.org. However, it will not be possible to limit a search to OAIster records alone.
• Data providers must request their records not be harvested, otherwise they will (opt-out policy).
• OAIster contributers must request free access to records in FirstSearch.

Now, I'm not entirely sure what all this means, but people were not happy. Reading the comments from the initial entry, people were concerned OCLC was going to sell all kinds of data, not just provide access to the metadata, and that records previously not on WorldCat would suddenly be there against the author's wishes. And more.

A follow-up entry was necessary, and OCLC actually had to change their terms and conditions with OAIster to specifically state that only metadata will be harvested. This clarification brought more comments of general dis-satisfaction, correctly wondering why a license was necessary and why things would be changing so much, in terms of copyright and such. As never having really dealt with OAIster issues, I don't fully understand their grievances, but they sounded legitimate.

So, this leads us to the post this past week, summarizing the first month the change-over happened. First thing, the terms and conditions that concerned people is now gone. The post says: "In keeping with the open style of the Open Archives Initiative community, if you make your metadata available for harvesting, you must intend for it to be harvested. We will also feel free to index it, provide access to it, and allow Google to crawl it." The opt-out strategy is still in place. OCLC is also allowing OAIster records to be searched separately from other WorldCat items, because OCLC "decided that the OAIster aggregation is an important enough destination for finding open access content". Or because there was an uproar, whatever. The comments to this post are much more positive, so apparently OCLC either made the right changes or wore everyone down.

On the surface, it seems fantastic that a larger organization is taking over the harvesting and accessing of metadata for the sustainability of the information. Although on WorldCat.org, there isn't an easily identifiable place to just search OAIster records. But, as was mentioned in a blog post, harvesting is hard! Maybe we should be thankful that someone is doing it (assuming it's being done correctly with good intentions, no GoogleBook excuses). It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few months and the reaction from users/authors/institutions. I'm sure HangingTogether will have more on this subject.