OCLC: The Library Behind Every Library
Near Columbus, Ohio
On the northwest side of Columbus, the suburb of Dublin is home to a headquarters that most people drive past without recognizing, yet it quietly powers nearly every public library, university library, and research archive on the planet. The building belongs to OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center, and what happens inside it is one of the great cooperative achievements of the information age.
The story starts in the summer of nineteen sixty-seven, when the presidents and library directors of Ohio's colleges and universities gathered at Ohio State University and signed articles of incorporation for a new nonprofit. Their problem was painfully familiar to any librarian: every institution was doing the exact same work, typing up catalog cards for the exact same books, independently, simultaneously, in hundreds of different buildings. The waste was enormous. Their solution was to pool the work.
They hired Frederick Kilgour, a librarian from Yale's medical school, to build the system. Kilgour's approach was radical for the time. He designed a shared online catalog, the first of its kind in the world, that went live in August nineteen seventy-one on a Sigma Five mainframe connected to library terminals across Ohio by dedicated phone lines. For the first time, when one library cataloged a book, every other library could simply copy the record.
The system grew far beyond Ohio. By nineteen seventy-seven, libraries outside the state could join. By nineteen eighty-one, the organization had moved its headquarters to Dublin and renamed itself simply OCLC. Today, nearly thirty thousand libraries in more than one hundred countries use OCLC services, and the shared catalog it maintains, called WorldCat, holds more than five hundred million bibliographic records. It is the largest database of library holdings in the world.
When a patron in Dubuque borrows a book from a library in Denver through interlibrary loan, or when a researcher anywhere on earth searches to find which library owns a rare manuscript, the invisible infrastructure making that work is largely this building, and the cooperative vision that was assembled here beside the Scioto River in nineteen sixty-seven.
