WorldCat goes public

It was a 35-year march, but we did it!

On August 8, 2006, OCLC launched the WorldCat.org Web site. This site offers a search box that people can download and use to search the more than 71 million records and 1.1 billion location listings in WorldCat. For the first time, collections in OCLC member libraries are now visible on the Internet to people everywhere.

This is one of the signal achievements in the history of the OCLC cooperative. It is a tribute not only to the vision of OCLC Founder Frederick G. Kilgour, but to the perseverance and hard work of catalogers and librarians who have built WorldCat record by record over the past 35 years.

Our long march began on August 26, 1971, when the OCLC online union catalog and shared cataloging system came up for the first time. Ohio University was the first institution in the world to do online cataloging. That first night, the OCLC computer system was struck by lightning—a dramatic beginning!

The OCLC database began life as a cataloging and resource sharing tool, but Fred Kilgour and the OCLC pioneers always dreamed that one day, it would be widely available to the general public.

Indeed, the first OCLC public use terminals began appearing in libraries as early as 1974. Back then, users grappled with the derived search keys (an author-title search was 4,4—the first four letters of the author’s last name, first four letters of the title; a title search was 3,2,2,1). An OCLC study noted that “most of the recorded use of the terminal was done by young, registered, frequent patrons of libraries.” People still had to go to the library to use the library, but we were making progress.

In 1980, OCLC and Columbus Metropolitan Library combined WorldCat with cable television in a home delivery of library services experiment. People in 200 households could access the library’s catalog and order books. The remote control device was bigger than a breadbox and was attached to the TV set by a 10-foot cable, but no matter, the future was just around the corner!

In 1991, we made another leap forward with FirstSearch. For the first time, people could search WorldCat by subject. Plus, they didn’t have to bother with derived, truncated search keys. We hailed this latest advance as “a revolutionary new concept in providing the general public with online reference information.”

In 2005, we launched the Open WorldCat program, which let people search a subset of WorldCat through popular search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!

Now, in 2006, people can search the entire OCLC database on the Internet through the OCLC Cooperative’s search site—WorldCat.org—and find the item in a nearby library.

Ten years from now and millions of records and billions of location listings later, WorldCat will likely be available in new ways that are now only dimly perceived through the haze of emerging technologies. In the meantime, we in the OCLC cooperative have much to be proud of. We have indeed come a long way!

Jay Jordan
OCLC President and Chief Executive Officer

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