OCLC

OCLC, Inc., doing business as OCLC, is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center, then became the Online Computer Library Center as it expanded. In 2017, the name was formally changed to OCLC, Inc. OCLC and thousands of its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded mainly by the fees that libraries pay (around $217.8 million annually in total ) for the many different services it offers. OCLC also maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system. OCLC began in 1967, as the Ohio College Library Center, through a collaboration of university presidents, vice presidents, and library directors who wanted to create a cooperative, computerized network for libraries in the state of Ohio. The group first met on July 5, 1967, on the campus of Ohio State University to sign the articles of incorporation for the nonprofit organization and hired Frederick G. Kilgour, a former Yale University medical school librarian, as first executive director. Kilgour and Ralph H. Parker, who was the head of libraries at the University of Missouri, had proposed the shared cataloging system in a 1965 report as consultants to the Committee of Librarians of the Ohio College Association. Kilgour and Parker wished to merge the latest information storage and retrieval system of the time, the computer, with the oldest, the library. They were inspired in part by the earlier Columbia–Harvard–Yale Medical Libraries Computerization Project, an attempt at shared automated printing of catalog cards. The plan was to merge the catalogs of Ohio libraries electronically through a computer network and database to streamline operations, control costs, and increase efficiency in library management, bringing libraries together cooperatively to best serve researchers and scholars.