OCLC Sues Baker & Taylor For “Allegedly Using Its Data to Create Competing Product”
From WOSU:
The Dublin-based nonprofit OCLC has filed a lawsuit against the company Baker & Taylor in the Southern District Court of Ohio over claims of interference with contracts and misuse of OCLC’s product, WorldCat. Both companies work with libraries, offering software, technology services and cataloging programs.
The suit was filed in late March and centers around OCLC’s product WorldCat, which is a cataloging program that has a database that includes scientific papers, music, articles and more than 400 million books. It’s used at many libraries and universities to find media and access scholarly articles.
The suit details a contentious relationship between OCLC and Baker & Taylor.
In 2002, OCLC hired the company Libros Sin Fronteras as consultants. OCLC claims that over time, records accessed by Libros Sin Fronteras “exponentially increased.” The increased activity, OCLC says, was beyond what Libros Sin Fronteras was contracted for, and in 2017, their access to WorldCat ended. Libros Sin Fronteras was owned by Baker & Taylor, which OCLC said it didn’t know when the two businesses started working together.
OCLC alleges that Baker & Taylor used Libros Sin Fronteras to gain access to WorldCat’s database.
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Filed under: Data Files, Journal Articles, Libraries, News
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
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