This is the story of a monster, a sorcerer’s apprentice, a nice little thing that’s grown and grown until it’s gotten out of hand and turned on its creators. It’s the story of a little-known organization called OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center) that is — no joke — trying to steal your library, all of our libraries, for itself.

OCLC was founded in 1967 by Fred Kilgour, a pioneering Ohio librarian, with a simple idea: Instead of having every library in the country separately catalog a book — laboriously entering its title, author, and subjects in just the right format — why not have one person enter the cataloging information, upload it to a central computer, and then let everyone else download a copy from there?

It was called WorldCat, for World Catalog, and it’s been a resounding success. Today it has around 50 million book records. But OCLC, the group that owns and operates it, has been a different story. It started small — a little office in Ohio, a set of membership dues to share the cost of running the servers. But OCLC’s control passed from librarians and academics to business people (its senior executive comes from consulting firm Deloitte & Touche). They realized they had a monopoly on their hands and as costs for running servers have gone down, their prices have gone up. They charge you once to get your records added to WorldCat and charge you again to get them back out and charge you a third time for a whole series of additional fees and services.

And these prices are high. A friend who runs a small public library with around 5000 cardholders was asked to pay $5400 to contribute his records and $700 to get records out, plus a whole series of “User Support” and “New Member Implementation” fees — all far more than he could afford.

They’ve used the resulting flow of cash to fund a spree of acquisitions of commercial companies and expand into other fields. Their small Ohio office has grown into a huge executive complex. They’ve used their power and influence to put other library suppliers out of business so they can sell the same products themselves. And, throughout it all, they’ve become increasingly closed, even secretive.

Not wanting to disrupt the money flow, OCLC has dragged its feet in getting library records on the Web. It wasn’t until a couple years ago that they finally put up a WorldCat website, and even then they’ve tried to keep a tight lid on it. Only Google and Yahoo are allowed to look at more a handful of pages, and even they were only given access to 2 out of 110 million, and even those are provided under a strict licensing agreement. In an era where people are increasingly turning to Google instead of to libraries for research, this is insane — it dooms libraries to further obscurity by not even giving their books a chance in world of search engines.

All this was bad, but it was tolerable. At least folks could build an alternative to OCLC. So that’s what I and others have been doing — Open Library provides a free collection of over 20 million book records that anyone browse, download, contribute to, and reuse for absolutely free. Naturally, OCLC hasn’t been a fan. They’ve been trying to kill it from the beginning — threatening its funders with lawsuits, insulting it in the press, and putting pressure on member libraries not to cooperate. (Again, notice the reversal: an organization libraries create to help them has now become so powerful that it is forcing libraries to help it.)

But recently, it’s gone one step way too far. Not satisfied with controlling the world’s largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It’s now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give the copyright to all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC copyright notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.

It’s not just Open Library that’s at risk here — LibraryThing, Zotero, even some new Wikipedia features being developed are threatened. Basically anything that uses information about books is going to be a victim of this unprecedented powergrab. It’s a scary thought.

Fortunately, the new rules haven’t gone into effect yet and it’s not too late to stop them. But we need your help. Please, spread the word about this disaster and share this blog post. Sign our petition demanding that they stop. And, if you’re a librarian or at a library, there’s a lot more you can do. First, you can share your library catalog now, before the new policy takes affect. Second, you put your own license on the records you contribute to OCLC, insisting that the entire catalog they appear in must be available under open terms. And third, you can use your OCLC membership status to pressure the organization to listen to libraries instead of dictating to them. Email me (me@aaronsw.com) if you’re interested in helping. Together, we can stop this thing.