Early movers in any market have an advantage over their competition. The Ohio College Library Center organization (which eventually grew to become OCL

The Scholarly Kitchen

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2022-06-23 06:00:08

Early movers in any market have an advantage over their competition. The Ohio College Library Center organization (which eventually grew to become OCLC) was no different.

In 1967, before most even knew what a computer was or how it might positively affect our lives, its team based in Dublin, Ohio was making great progress in the electronic management of bibliographic information. In August of 1971, the cooperative helped the Alden Library at Ohio University launch the first online catalog of any library in the world. OCLC continued to be a pioneer in many of the moves to digitize and interconnect library catalog data, all the while improving the services and making libraries more efficient. It also began to generate significant surpluses, with which it continued to expand the services it could provide to the library community and serve a worldwide network. What was once a regional network of libraries has today become a massive institution serving a global community of more than 30,000 libraries, while also becoming one of the leading employers in the state of Ohio .

Every library needs a catalog of the items it holds and acquires. A good catalog is vital to managing a collection and supporting its circulation. This is no small effort and, if individually replicated in the thousands of libraries around the world, it would be a laborious and costly endeavor, particularly if each record was hand-curated by experts in library sciences. It absolutely made sense in the world of digital information that efficiencies could be gained by having the network of libraries share both the work and their data collaboratively, thereby reducing unnecessary duplication and improving overall quality across the network. OCLC claims, reasonably, that it has invested millions of dollars in working with librarians and publishers to build and license as comprehensive a worldwide catalog as possible. It regularly enhances the quality of its records through a variety of approaches. This has benefited the vast majority of libraries and also OCLC’s bottom line.  

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