rvation
resources. From its headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC operated one of
the world's largest library information networks. Libraries in the US
joined OCLC through their OCLC-affiliated regional networks. Libraries
outside the US received OCLC services through OCLC Asia Pacific, OCLC
Canada, OCLC Europe, OCLC Latin America and the Caribbean, or via
international distributors.

OCLC was also running WorldCat - the name of the OCLC Online Union
Catalog - which is a merged electronic catalog of library catalogs
around the world, and the world's largest bibliographic database with
its 38 million records (in early 1998) in 400 languages (with
transliteration for non-Roman languages), and an annual increase of 2
million records.

WorldCat stemmed from a concept which is the same for all union
catalogs: earn time to avoid the cataloguing of the same document by
many catalogers worldwide. When they are about to catalog a
publication, the catalogers of the member libraries search the OCLC
catalog. If they find the record, they copy it in their own catalog and
add some local information. If they don't find the record, they create
it in the OCLC catalog, and this new record is immediately available to
all the catalogers of the member libraries worldwide.

Unlike RLIN, another main union catalog that accepts several records
for the same document (please see below), the OCLC Online Union Catalog
accepts only one record per document, and asks its members not to
create duplicate records for documents that were already cataloged. The
records are created in USMARC format (MARC: Machine Readable Catalog)
according to the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd version (AACR2).

What is the history of OCLC? "In 1967, the presidents of the colleges
and universities in the state of Ohio founded the Ohio College Library
Center (OCLC) to develop a computerized system in which the libraries
of Ohio academic institutions could share resources and reduce costs.
OCLC's first offices were in the Main Library on the campus of the Ohio
State University (OSU), and its first computer room was housed in the
OSU Research Center. It was from these academic roots that Frederick G.
Kilgour, OCLC's first president, oversaw the growth of OCLC from a
regional computer system for 54 Ohio colleges into an international
network. In 1977, the Ohio members of OCLC adopted changes in the
governance structure that enabled libraries outside Ohio to become
mem