OCLC, Inc.

OCLC began in 1967, as the Ohio College Library Center, through a collaboration of university presidents, vice presidents, and library directors who wanted to create a cooperative, computerized network for libraries in the state of Ohio. The group first met on July 5, 1967, on the campus of Ohio State University to sign the articles of incorporation for the nonprofit organization and hired Frederick G. Kilgour, a former Yale University medical school librarian, as first executive director.

Kilgour and Ralph H. Parker, who was the head of libraries at the University of Missouri, had proposed the shared cataloging system in a 1965 report as consultants to the Committee of Librarians of the Ohio College Association. Kilgour and Parker wished to merge the latest information storage and retrieval system of the time, the computer, with the oldest, the library. They were inspired in part by the earlier Columbia–Harvard–Yale Medical Libraries Computerization Project, an attempt at shared automated printing of catalog cards. The plan was to merge the catalogs of Ohio libraries electronically through a computer network and database to streamline operations, control costs, and increase efficiency in library management, bringing libraries together cooperatively to best serve researchers and scholars. The first library to do online cataloging through OCLC was the Alden Library at Ohio University on August 26, 1971. This was the first online cataloging by any library worldwide.

Between 1967 and 1977, OCLC membership was limited to institutions in Ohio, but in 1978, a new governance structure was established that allowed institutions from other states to join. With this expansion, the name changed to the Online Computer Library Center in 1977. In 2002, the governance structure was again modified to accommodate participation from outside the United States.

As OCLC expanded services in the United States outside Ohio, it relied on establishing strategic partnerships with "networks", organizations that provided training, support and marketing services. By 2008, there were 15 independent United States regional service providers. OCLC networks played a key role in OCLC governance, with networks electing delegates to serve on the OCLC Members Council. During 2008, OCLC commissioned two studies to look at distribution channels; at the same time, the council approved governance changes that had been recommended by the Board of Trustees severing the tie between the networks and governance. In early 2009, OCLC negotiated new contracts with the former networks and opened a centralized support center.

In July 2010, the company was sued by SkyRiver, a rival startup, in an antitrust suit. Library automation company Innovative Interfaces joined SkyRiver in the suit. The suit was dropped in March 2013, however, following the acquisition of SkyRiver by Innovative Interfaces.

Innovative Interfaces was bought by ExLibris in 2020, therefore passing OCLC as the dominant supplier of ILS services in the U.S. (over 70% market share for academic libraries and over 50% for public libraries for ExLibris, versus OCLC's 10% market share of both types of libraries in 2019).

In 2022, membership and governance expanded to include any institution with a subscription to one of many qualifying OCLC products (previously institutions qualified for membership by "contributing intellectual content or participating in global resource or reference sharing"), with the exception of for-profit organizations that are part of OCLC's partner program. This change reflected OCLC's expanding number of services due to its corporate acquisitions.

Presidents

The following people served successively as president of OCLC:

Services

OCLC provides bibliographic, abstract and full-text information to anyone.

OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the largest online public access catalog (OPAC) in the world. WorldCat has holding records from public and private libraries worldwide.

The Online Computer Library Center acquired the trademark and copyrights associated with the Dewey Decimal Classification System when it bought Forest Press in 1988. A browser for books with their Dewey Decimal Classifications was available until July 2013; it was replaced by the Classify Service.

Until August 2009, when it was sold to Backstage Library Works, OCLC owned a preservation microfilm and digitization operation called the OCLC Preservation Service Center, with its principal office in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

OCLC acquired NetLibrary, a provider of electronic books and textbooks, in 2002 and sold it in 2010 to EBSCO Industries. OCLC owns 100% of the shares of OCLC PICA, a library automation systems and services company which has its headquarters in Leiden in the Netherlands and which was renamed "OCLC" at the end of 2007. In July 2006, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) merged with OCLC.

On January 11, 2008, OCLC announced that it had purchased EZproxy. It has also acquired OAIster. The process started in January 2009 and from October 31, 2009, OAIster records are freely available via WorldCat.org.

In 2013, OCLC acquired the Dutch library automation company HKA and its integrated library system Wise, which OCLC calls a "community engagement system" that "combines the power of customer relationship management, marketing, and analytics with ILS functions". OCLC began offering Wise to libraries in the United States in 2019.

In January 2015, OCLC acquired Sustainable Collection Services (SCS). SCS offered consulting services based on analyzing library print collection data to help libraries manage and share materials. In 2017, OCLC acquired Relais International, a library interlibrary loan service provider based in Ottawa, Canada.

Criticism

In May 2008, OCLC was criticized by Jeffrey Beall for monopolistic practices, among other faults. Library blogger Rick Mason responded that although he thought Beall had some "valid criticisms" of OCLC, he demurred from some of Beall's statements and warned readers to "beware the hyperbole and the personal nature of his criticism, for they strongly overshadow that which is worth stating".

In November 2008, the Board of Directors of OCLC unilaterally issued a new Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records that would have required member libraries to include an OCLC policy note on their bibliographic records; the policy caused an uproar among librarian bloggers. Among those who protested the policy was the non-librarian activist Aaron Swartz, who believed the policy would threaten projects such as the Open Library, Zotero, and Wikipedia, and who started a petition to "Stop the OCLC powergrab". Swartz's petition garnered 858 signatures, but the details of his proposed actions went largely unheeded. Within a few months, the library community had forced OCLC to retract its policy and to create a Review Board to consult with member libraries more transparently. In August 2012, OCLC recommended that member libraries adopt the Open Data Commons Attribution (ODC-BY) license when sharing library catalog data, although some member libraries have explicit agreements with OCLC that they can publish catalog data using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

In 2025, OCLC dropped the lawsuit it brought in 2024 in Ohio against a librarian and employee of the University of California, Berkeley Libraries who denied involvement in Anna's Archive's large-scale web scraping of WorldCat after the judge had deferred a number of issues to the Ohio Supreme Court due to the unprecedented nature of the case (see Anna's Archive § OCLC lawsuit). Technology writer Glyn Moody criticized the suit as "costly and pointless", saying it went against OCLC's stated mission of making information accessible.