As I noted in my comments to Ed Summers on eFoundations, OCLC was a community solution – it emerged from the community to meet a community need. Now, we can argue about whether it emerged in a different era and, therefore, whether is still has relevance. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t? I think that remains to be seen.

But, as a membership organisation, if it doesn’t meet the needs of the members, or if the costs of membership (by which I mean more than monetary costs) outweigh the perceived benefits, then presumably members will leave and it will collapse.

It seems to me that what tends to be missing from much of the OCLC/Worldcat discussion is proper consideration of sustainability which, at the end of the day, is one of the ‘costs’ that members have to consider. For community solutions to be sustainable, someone has to pay for them (unless we are really arguing that the role of the ‘concentrator’ is no longer required – which I don’t think is the case).

In a world of relatively plentiful, relatively sustained JISC-funding, it is pretty easy to say, “everything should be free (even to people who would simply use the content to replicate the community-based service)”. This is less true for Talis of course, but then, as you note, it isn’t quite clear where they are coming from on this anyway. Indeed, I have no idea whether they make their own members’ catalogue records available for free in the way they seem to want OCLC to do (and I don’t much care!).

I think this is one of the areas where there is a significant danger of JISC funding doing a disservice to the community because the costs (both of startup and in longer term), and therefore any real measure of value to the community, get skewed by the ongoing availability of funding.

Interestingly… being somewhat outside the JISC fold now, I feel more acutely aware of sustainability issues than I was before. Not necessarily any wiser mind you!

Paul