This is a bit rich

What are these? Surely not the OCLC number, which has no creative element.

This doesn't point to any specific entry in the blog, but I do find this "the world’s largest open-source non-profit search engine for shadow libraries" (https://annas-blog.org/how-to-run-a-shadow-library.html). There is a difference between a shadow library and a search engine for shadow libraries. Thoughout this document OCLC claims that Anna's is a shadow library rather than a search engine. It appears to be both but the Anna's site isn't entirely clear. It does say that it mirrors other sites, but not precisely which ones.

This is irrelevant to OCLC's claims.

Oh ho, now we get to talk about how OCLC holds ITSELF as a non-profit. See: https://dltj.org/article/oclc-tax-exemption-status/

This actually does not make sense to me. Though they view one record at a time, the enhancements are what is valuable? And I'm sure that it would not be hard to question the "high-quality" records. I'm sure that some are but we all know that there is a fair amount of cruft.

This doesn't make sense. That the data supports other products is true only because there are customers for those products. There's no value to OCLC on its own.

I would like to see them quantify this 'exceptionally high quality'

It's a record number. Yes, it can be used to search the OCLC database, but it is no more authoritative than the model number in the Ikea catalog. Record identifiers are of course quick searches, but they probably are rarely used by humans search bibliographic databases.

The emphasis in WC is on library holdings and the bib data supports that. The bib data alone is not WC.

Nearby libraries that are OCLC members. Many libraries are not, in part because the costs are so high. This is especially true of public libraries. I also would like to see which libraries in developing countries are OCLC members and what services they use.

Not that they have a choice, as we saw during the ado about ownership and copyright.

Also, once again, only those who have signed the contract are bound by its rules.

I think this hides the fact that libraries pay for specific services, such as for each record they use in cataloging. This is a coop that acts like a commercial service.

I wonder if adding the OCN is included in this 93%. These statements about record improvement are just platitudes. I actually would like to see one of these suits go to trial so someone can question OCLC about the particulars.

Above they say that WC is "also a registry of library holdings". It seems that they are considering the bib data and the holdings data to be separate.

Not sure what they are meaning by "web-scale" here. other than being buzz-wordy

But they say Anna's downloaded 700 million records, which would be more than all of OCLC. Somebody's figures are off.

It would be great if they were unique in the sense of one record for one book, but there is a lot of duplication in the database.

Anna's is not pirating any books. They seem to be using the bibliographic records to identify books that are not available on the pirate sites, but that isn't the same as pirating.

Hmmm. I'd like to see some figures on this "enrichment." Especially compared to OCLC's revenue which is between 300-400 million dollars.

Wouldn't that only be the case if they had a contract with OCLC that included said terms and conditions?

Really? Nefarious? They downloaded bibliographic records they didn't drink the blood of virgins.

This is a deliberate mis-statement of what was in the blog post. The post was referring not to OCLC but to the staff of OCLC, making a distinction between those colleagues that the blogger regards highly and the organization they work for. That is the "you" in the quoted statement. And it is very clear who is being addressed, yet OCLC chose to present this as a statement to itself.

Note that "member libraries" are not party to this lawsuit even though they have spent considerable $$ creating the data. It would be very interesting to know the dollar amount that libraries have spent, but since they are the source of OCLC's income in essence every penny spent has come from the libraries.

Citation?

Again, mingling statements about worldcat data and bibliographic records - they aren't the same.

Anna's is not a shadow library, it is a search engine consisting of bibliographic data that connects to shadow libraries. Anna's claims it does not store any copies of books.

No proof, or even a clear statement, that these were related to scraping by Anna's.

Money spent on cataloging and on the WC.org interface is not the same as money spent to improve the database. It isn't clear what is included in these figures. To be sure, nothing that Anna's has done "steals" the WorldCat.org service, which consists of a database and a user interface.

I don't think that libraries are looking for "traffic" but it is the case that WorldCat functions as the online catalog for some libraries. It is a very poor user service but in some cases library management has adopted it because it is presumably less expensive than managing their own catalog. Note that the University of California campus libraries each have their own catalog on proprietary software and WorldCat has replaced a previous union catalog that was managed by the University.

Again, this confounds bibliographic and catalog data. Bibliographic data is a bunch of facts about resources, and those facts are outside of OCLC's purview.

This moves the argument from bibliographic data to holdings data. AFAIK, Anna's is not making any use of the holdings data and therefore its use is not in conflict with any of the WorldCat functions that are based on libraries and library collections. The bibliographic data for a book is not library catalog data because that latter includes the identifier for the library and the location of the book within the library.

Some mention should also be made of the costs that libraries have incurred, both on payment to OCLC but also their own staff time. Note that these libraries are not party to this suit, and so far none have complained about this use of their labor and expenditure.

There are libraries that do their cataloging elsewhere but pay OCLC to upload their records so they will be found - mainly by other libraries. These uploading libraries do not place restrictions on the use of their data, but OCLC does.

WorldCat is an authoritative source. There are many others, including most national libraries and some library consortia.

is there anything that is necessary but that cannot be expressed in UML?

depends on the verb - what would you use as the inverse of 'opens'?

This was the problem with PROF - there was no single source of truth, and they resisted adding a category "authoritative" to indicate one.

there are no properties on classes or superclasses, and there is no inheritance. classes aren't things, they are qualities and a number of things may have those qualities. The qualities themselves do not have properties.

1-datatype properties are attributes (that makes some sense, I just never heard it called that before 2- no annotation properties