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Skyriver (bibliographic utility)

The Skyriver company was founded by Jerry Kline, the owner and co-founder of Innovative Interfaces, Inc (III) and launched in October, 2009. Skyriver's current president is Leslie Straus who retired as the former vice president for worldwide sales and marketing at III. Skyriver currently shares office space and administrative support at the Innovative corporate offices in Emeryville, CA.

SkyRiver had an initial bibliographic database of about 20 million records. It reportedly used a variety of cataloging record resources including MARC records from the Library of Congress, the British Library, CONSER, and a variety of public domain sources. It uses authority control records from Library of Congress Subject Headings and NACO. The database continues to grow as the cataloging records are added from the libraries that subscribe to its services.

SkyRiver services allows libraries one click importing of MARC records into their local library system, unlimited access to the SkyRiver database for searching, editing, and downloading, advanced intuitive search engine with facets and tags, MARC record creation tools for original cataloging, templates for constant data, mechanisms to identify and capture records from other sources, record notification services and support of libraries that acquire shelf-ready materials.

Stated aims of Skyriver have been:


 * 1. Save libraries money on bibliographic services
 * 2. Maintain a high quality database free of duplicate records
 * 3. Focus on cataloging services

Competition in the library marketplace

Although its database is relatively small in size, Skyriver has been marketing itself as a quality lower cost alternative to the dominate library cataloging utility OCLC Although other companies and organizations have attempted to compete with OCLC in the past, libraries have found it difficult to even consider using other cataloging services. OCLC has the largest database of its kind in the world (with over 144 million MARC records) and OCLC organization leverages its WorldCat database by providing resource sharing between the libraries subscribing to its services. In addition, OCLC has systematically absorbed both competitors, derivative suppliers of cataloging records, and any failed attempts at competition. However, even with advances in network and computer technology and changes OCLC has made in its pricing structures, the cost of these services to libraries has remained largely the same.

Cost saving and resource sharing issues

In November 2009, Michigan State University's Library (MSU) in East Lansing, became the first ARL library (Association of Research Libraries) to go live with Skyriver. They hoped to see significantly savings by going with Skyriver (about $80,000) and to encourage healthy competition to bring down cataloging prices for everyone. They have continued to be a OCLC member in order to use the other services including Interlibrary loan. They had planned to supply their holdings in "batch mode" to the OCLC WorldCat database. However, OCLC surprised them in February by notified MSU (and others) when they were revised OCLC's longtime published pricing of .23 per record to $2.85 per record to batch load records. If MSU batch loaded their holdings as they had intended, this price inflation would "virtually eliminated" any price savings with realized by switching to Skyriver. So, MSU has decided they cannot afford to load their holding into OCLC and have told the library community about why. OCLC, which is having other PR problems at the moment including its Proposed Record Use Policy, warns "cheaper source of commonly used records" will have "serious economic problems" and hint at them being the demise of the WorldCat database. During a recent conference presentation, MSU cited OCLC high salaries of management and trustees, and OCLC getting into ILS business and other side ventures, as some of the reasons competition is good for the library bibliographic utility business.

At the moment, there seems to be a standoff. MSU and Skyriver is saying that OCLC can not sustain this model and keep it's resource sharing mission intact. Skyriver has mentioned that other as yet unnamed libraries are testing its product and welcome the chance to show it off to any interested libraries.