Use case 4: Supporting commercial services

Use

Description

It may be possible for an institution to generate revenue from their collection; particularly where they hold rare or unique materials. In order to make these materials discoverable, it is necessary to use bibliographic records to support the search and retrieval function.

Illustrative example: The University of Complex Problems has a collection of rare 19th century music manuscripts. Their catalogue records are a mixture of their own cataloguing and records that came from the other two libraries in the world with similar collections. UCP have scanned their copies of the manuscripts, and want to sell them through Amazon’s Print on Demand service; it is necessary to upload the catalogue records to Amazon to allow potential customers find the material.

Record flow

This will depend on the details of how the service is organised. In the illustrative example above, the work is out-sourced to the printer so the records are used by the institution, but other arrangement are possible. The types of record flow are described in detail here.

Current examples

Cornell University has scanned and made available more than 80,000 books through Amazon. These books are in the public domain, and many are rare and out-of-print.

Discussion

Uses like this are in a grey area – the organisations interviewed for this project did not have a clear view of how they would view such use. It is likely that these situations will become more frequent as libraries look for opportunities to generate alternative income streams.

Please note that the legal implications for your institution of this use case will depend upon your specific contractual relationships - for more information see the discussion of suppliers' and libraries' current viewpoints on what is allowable, and the legal environment. 

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