The OCLC Board of Trustees has approved a new WorldCat record use policy, developed by a Record Use Policy Council and informed by community input. WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities for the OCLC Cooperative will be effective August 1, 2010. The new policy outlines the rights and responsibilities associated with stewardship of the WorldCat bibliographic and holdings database by and for the OCLC cooperative. This includes the use and exchange of OCLC member-contributed data comprising WorldCat.
The policy was drafted by the Record Use Policy Council, a group of 12 library leaders charged by the OCLC Board of Trustees to craft a replacement for the Guidelines for Use and Transfer of OCLC Derived Records, which was developed in 1987.
In April 2010, the Record Use Policy Council submitted to the library community and to the OCLC Board a draft policy that began a two-month period of community review and discussion. More than 275 comments were gathered via e-mail, phone, meetings and letters, in an online forum, and by monitoring blogs, listservs, and Twitter. At the end of May, community input was incorporated and a policy statement was submitted to the OCLC Board, which approved the revised document during its June meeting.
The policy is based on the premise that OCLC members value WorldCat as a comprehensive, timely, and accurate reflection of the consolidated holdings of those members. The policy's intent is to encourage the widespread use of WorldCat bibliographic data while also supporting the ongoing and long-term sustainability and utility of WorldCat and of WorldCat-based services such as resource sharing, cataloging, and discovery.
The new policy will become effective August 1, 2010, replacing the Guidelines for Use and Transfer of OCLC Derived Records. Because the data sharing environment is constantly and rapidly evolving, this new policy will be regularly reviewed to ensure its continued timeliness.
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