Press: “End of an Era at OCLC: Jay Jordan Reflects on His 14-Year Tenure”

“What about projects like the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) or Europeana. Are you talking to them?

“Absolutely. We’ve been to many of the DPLA meetings. We’re very much engaged with public libraries in helping them understand how they fit in that construct.

“And how receptive are they to your position as far as licensing goes?

“I think everybody would say give me CC0. Europeana does. So we are saying we understand that, and we understand as soon as we give you CC0 then it’s open to everyone. So why would I disadvantage the long-term sustainability of the cooperative by just handing [it over]…. Brewster [Kahle, head of the Internet Archive] and I have had many discussions. “Give me all of WorldCat for OpenLibrary,” and I said, “No, I’m not going to do that, because as soon as I give it to Open Library then it goes everywhere else in the world, to commercial providers, so I’m not going to do it.” The [March 1] announcement [that two equity firms had invested in Innovative Interfaces] was interesting. Now all three of the large ILS vendors in the world are owned by private equity, right? I don’t know exactly what share they bought, but I would be willing to bet a lot of money that it’s majority control. I don’t know that, but the point is that I think this global cooperative has worked reasonably well for lo these 45 years, and I think those are assets that belong to member libraries of the cooperative. And we should look at how we can collaborate most effectively with Europeana, with the National Library of Sweden, DPLA, HathiTrust; we are doing lots of things with lots of them. It’s a very, very important issue.”

From the Library Journal interview with Jay Jordan, End of an Era at OCLC: Jay Jordan Reflects on His 14-Year Tenure