OCLC’s Kilgour Dies at 92

By Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 9/1/2006

Frederick G. Kilgour, who transformed librarianship by founding OCLC and developing the WorldCat database, died on July 31. He was 92 and most recently a distinguished research professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, serving until 2004. Kilgour was a technovisionary throughout his career. In a November 15, 1989 article for Library Journal (“Toward 100 Percent Availability”), he posited a “system for retrieving information from books in machine-readable form,” with full text stored online—an apparent precursor to Google’s ambitious plan to scan library collections.

While librarian of the Yale Medical Library, New Haven, CT, Kilgour began to investigate library use and effectiveness. In 1967, he was hired by the Ohio College Association to lead the Ohio College Library Center (which eventually became the Online Computer Library Center, or OCLC) in developing a shared library system. Four years later, WorldCat, that shared cataloging system, emerged. Because libraries no longer had to catalog each item from scratch, they could vastly increase the number of books cataloged and with fewer staff.

Kilgour, president of OCLC from 1967 to 1980, helped it become a vast international network, instituting an online interlibrary loan system and launching multiple other endeavors. OCLC now links 55,000 institutions in 110 countries. He wrote 205 scholarly papers and several books, including Evolution of the Book (Oxford Univ., 1999). In 1982, the American Library Association presented him with honorary life membership. Said Jay Jordan, OCLC president and CEO, “His vision continues to influence the evolution of research, scholarship, and education in the digital age.”