After last week’s announcement to publish VIAF as open linked data under the license ODC-BY new OCLC news are indicating a new course of the organization: The same step is under discussion for Worldcat, the union catalogue should also fall under the license ODC-BY. Furthermore the engagement of Richard Wallis has been announced, Wallis new roll in the OCLC is the “Technology Evangelist”.

Peter Murray reports on Disruptive Library Technology Jester, that the publication of Worldcat data under the license ODC-BY has been discussed on the OCLC Global Council Meeting. It hasn’t been an announcement yet, but the Jim Michalko (Vice President of OCLC)made the recommendation for the OCLC leadership for the OCLC organs Global Council and Board of Trustees to set the Worldcat database under Open Data Commons-BY. Robin Murray (Vice President of OCLC) emphasized that linked-data should be seen as chance for Worldcat, because it could grow the funding support, what would be lowering the cost of the upload to Worldcat.

The recently announced recruitment of Richard Wallis also shows that the OCLC is increasing their engagement for linked data. Wallis spent 20 years at Talisfor linked data and semantic web and has got quite a reputation as expert, blogger and host of the podcast series Library 2.0 Gang. His role as “Technology Evangelist” is to enthuse libraries and librarians. Wallis blogs about it: „My title is Technology Evangelist, and there is a great deal of evangelism needed – promoting, explaining, and demystifying the benefits of Linked Data to libraries and librarians.“

Furthermore has Richard Wallis to support the organizations linked data approaches and projects. In the press release he is already brought in connection with the ODC-BY release of the Worldcat data. Wallis just wrote in his blog: „Oh and yes, they have a great deal of data which has huge potential on the Linked Data Web and it will be great to be a part of realising at least some of that potential.”