Your tax dollars paid for all the cataloging at the Library of Congress.
Unfortunately, some years back the firm that records these records in the MARC formats legally got control not only of their formatted tapes, but of any use of the information used after extraction from these tapes. In other words, they not only own the format, but the government funded information contained in the format.
This is critical because these MARC tapes are the primary source of library cataloging information for most libraries. There are some other independent networks, primarily of educational institutions in the western US, but most libraries depend on the Library of Congress OCLC tapes.
The whole thing stinks, and is ridiculous. As a former librarian, who also holds a BSCS, I was outraged at this theft of public assets. The worst part was dealing with my moronic former colleagues who screamed that of course this company should own this information - it was "intellectual property." Thousands of librarians wrote letters in supporting this company's "intellectual property rights" to work created at tax payer expense.
This happened because most librarians think that putting information into a data format is some mystical arcana mastered only by brilliant wizards. They do not realize that the far more difficult part of the operation was the original cataloging done by the awesome catalogers at the Library of Congress.
So, libraries pay for the nose for software. First, the fee that the vendor has to pay for using the MARC tapes, the royalties for the actual use of the data contained on the tapes, and then for the library software itself. BTW, most library software is so atrocious, buggy, and difficult to use that it's writers would receive a failing grade if it had been turned in as a senior project at any half way reputable college.
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Your tax dollars paid for all the cataloging at the Library of Congress.
Unfortunately, some years back the firm that records these records in the MARC formats legally got control not only of their formatted tapes, but of any use of the information used after extraction from these tapes. In other words, they not only own the format, but the government funded information contained in the format.
This is critical because these MARC tapes are the primary source of library cataloging information for most libraries. There are some other independent networks, primarily of educational institutions in the western US, but most libraries depend on the Library of Congress OCLC tapes.
The whole thing stinks, and is ridiculous. As a former librarian, who also holds a BSCS, I was outraged at this theft of public assets. The worst part was dealing with my moronic former colleagues who screamed that of course this company should own this information - it was "intellectual property." Thousands of librarians wrote letters in supporting this company's "intellectual property rights" to work created at tax payer expense.
This happened because most librarians think that putting information into a data format is some mystical arcana mastered only by brilliant wizards. They do not realize that the far more difficult part of the operation was the original cataloging done by the awesome catalogers at the Library of Congress.
So, libraries pay for the nose for software. First, the fee that the vendor has to pay for using the MARC tapes, the royalties for the actual use of the data contained on the tapes, and then for the library software itself. BTW, most library software is so atrocious, buggy, and difficult to use that it's writers would receive a failing grade if it had been turned in as a senior project at any half way reputable college.