After releasing their new records policy, pulling it back and re-releasing it, I put together a much-appreciated simple “diff,” using MediaWiki’s history feature. It was easy to do, once someone found a cached copy of the original, since both were HTML documents.

Now OCLC has released a third version of the policy, this time in PDF. The new version is harder to manipulate. (Hasn’t anyone at OCLC read Jacob Nielsen.) Adobe PDF and Preview mangle and rearrange the text when cut-and-pasted.

Is there any kind soul out there who wants to whip the text into shape and post it on the wiki page so we can do yet another diff?

Update: After wrangling with the text—sent by various people—it looks like this is going to be very hard to do. The text differs in all sorts of minor formatting ways that throw off the diff. Besides, OCLC will probably just release another version next week—no doubt in JPEG, or carved, like the Behistun Inscription, where only the gods can read it.

Labels: oclc, worldcat