Skip to page content

United States (English) Change
About OCLC

The world’s libraries. Connected.

Caption goes here

71,000 libraries. 112 countries. 42 years of cooperation.

In 1967, a small group of Ohio library leaders believed that working together they could find practical solutions to the day’s most pressing issues facing libraries. What began as a “challenge to use newly available computer technology to automate the traditional library card catalog” rapidly became a collaborative revolution involving thousands of libraries around the world. Working together, libraries streamlined their operations and created the “world’s library catalog, WorldCat, all for the public purpose of increasing access to expanding body of worldwide scientific, literary and educational knowledge.

Today, the values that brought those Ohio libraries together—cooperation, sharing and public service—are as relevant and as important as they were in the past, as librarians tackle the issues of the digital age: access, discovery, delivery, metadata, preservation and content, to name a few.

While we all thought that our original decision—to give over autonomy of our cataloging—was momentous, we now face decisions that are far weightier. Today’s libraries are being asked to create and preserve primary materials—journals and archives, and the decisions to sacrifice autonomy for cost control, access and the common good have far-reaching consequences. In these times, it is imperative that we work collaboratively.”

Shirley Baker, Vice Chancellor, Information Technology and Dean, University Libraries, Washington University