1st Edition

Weaving Libraries into the Web OCLC 1998-2008

Edited By Jay Jordan Copyright 2011
    232 Pages
    by Routledge

    232 Pages
    by Routledge

    The year 1997 found the members of the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) cooperative in an expansive mood. More than 1,000 library leaders attended the OCLC President’s Luncheon in San Francisco, where they celebrated OCLC’s 30th anniversary. There were more than 25,000 libraries participating in the cooperative, including nearly 3,000 libraries in 62 countries outside the U.S., and the WorldCat database contained more than 37 million bibliographic records.

    Over the next ten years, the global digital library would indeed emerge, but in a form that few could have predicted. Against a backdrop of continuous technological change and the rapid growth of the Internet, the OCLC cooperative’s WorldCat database continued to grow and was a central theme of the past decade.

    As the chapters in this book show, OCLC’s chartered objectives of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing the rate of rising library costs continue to resonate among libraries and librarians, as the OCLC cooperative enters its fifth decade.

    This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Library Administration.

    Introduction  Jay Jordan  1. Biographical sketch of Frederick G. Kilgour (from NextSpace)  Phil Schieber  2. Governing a global cooperative  Larry P. Alford  3. A brief history of the OCLC Members Council  George Needham and Rich Van Orden  4. RLG and OCLC: Combined for the Future  Lizabeth Wilson, James Neal, James Michalko and Jay Jordan  5. OCLC in the Asia Pacific Region  Anthony W. Ferguson and Andrew Wang  6. History and activity of OCLC in Canada  Daniel Boivin  7. OCLC in Europe, the Middle East and Africa  Janet Lees  8. OCLC in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Chronology  Lawrence Olszewski  9. The OCLC Network of Regional Service Providers: The Last 10 Years  Brenda Bailey-Hainer  10. The Jay Jordan IFLA/OCLC Early Career Development Fellowship Program: A Long Name for an Important Project  Nancy Lensenmayer and George Needham  11. 21st Century Library Systems  Andrew Pace  12. Next Generation Cataloging  Karen Calhoun and Renee Register  13. The DDC and OCLC  Joan S. Mitchell and Diane Vizine-Goetz  14. The Revolution Continues: Resource Sharing and OCLC in the New Century  William J. Crowe  15. Virtual Reference Reflections  Stewart Bodner  16. Digital Collections: History and Perspectives  Greg Zick  17. The RLG Partnership  James Michalko  18. WebJunction: A Community for Library Staff  Marilyn Gell Mason  19. OCLC Research: Past, Present, and Future  Nancy Elkington  20. Advocacy and OCLC  Cathy De Rosa  21. OCLC 1998-2008: Weaving Libraries into the Web  Jay Jordan  22. Chronology: Noteworthy Achievements of the Cooperative 1967-2008  Phil Schieber

    Biography

    Jay Jordan became the fourth president in OCLC's 38-year history in May 1998. He came to OCLC after a 24-year career with Information Handling Services, an international publisher of databases, where he held a series of key positions in top management, including President of IHS Engineering. He is active in professional organizations, including the American Library Association and the Special Libraries Association. He is a Fellow of the Standards Engineering Society.