OCLC and Open Access: Riding to the Rescue or Rustling the Herd? by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Feb 5)
Lots to take in in this article about OCLC's new partnerships to gain open access materials.
"OCLC (www.oclc.org) has announced a partnership that would ultimately transfer an open access icon, the University of Michigan Library’s OAIster service (www.oaister.org), to OCLC."
Why did OAIster and OCLC do this? Perhaps OAIster had become too big to manage. And OCLC says that ""Adding records for open archive collections is a natural complement to WorldCat and will drive discovery and access of these collections for a broader community of scholars.""
HathiTrust is also covered in this article. "The HathiTrust is a new player in the open access arena, but it’s a major one with more than 2.6 million documents." Most of these come from Google Book Search Library partners.
"Under the new agreement with OCLC, the millions of books and archived documents hosted in a single repository by HathiTrust and made available for reading online will become more visible and accessible with the creation of WorldCat records for content. OCLC will also link to the collections in its Open Web WorldCat.org service as well as its WorldCat Local service. As executive director of the HathiTrust, Wilkin sees "the connection between HathiTrust and WorldCat as a natural. WorldCat and HathiTrust are both built by and for libraries, and their pursuit of comprehensiveness will aid our community in pursuit of more effective collection management, as well as integration of services across our institutions.""
Posted by Gwen at February 5, 2009 02:32 PM