[WEB4LIB] RE: Yahoo-OCLC toolbar

[Jim Campbell]

I have no particular wish to leap to the defense of Google, Yahoo or OCLC.
There's plenty wrong with all this and they're all quite capable of
defending themselves (though if they'd like to send me a little remuneration
....). 

In fairness though, if you look at the Open WorldCat FAQ you'll learn that
both Google and Yahoo are in the process of crawling WorldCat to add data.
They're working at different rates and no doubt in different ways. Until
they're done, you're going to see plenty of differences between Google and
Yahoo and not just beacuse of different search algorithms, and they're both
almost always going to pull up fewer results than a native search of
WorldCat. Incidentally, you'd also learn that OCLC intends to FRBRize the
whole thing, though they don't say when.

So dump on them for releasing their wine before its time (though they were
getting so many uses they clearly decided they were filling a need), dump on
OCLC for not being clear about the commercial side (at some point there's
going to be a charge, probably folded into your WorldCat subscription), dump
on OCLC for limiting the amount of searchable data (try to find a DVD), but
let's leave some things uncriticized until the project is done and we can
give it a fair test. 

I'd like some changes and I agree with the earlier comments that
RedLightGreen is a more interesting product for the future of libraries, but
getting information about library holdings into the major search engines is
worthwhile too as helping to ensure that libraries have a future. In the
meantime, if you really don't like the way it works, you should persuade
your library either to opt out or to get an opac link in there.

- Jim Campbell
Campbell at Virginia.edu