F. Kilgour in CHE

["James J. O'Donnell" <jod@georgetown.edu>]

Frederick G. Kilgour, Developer of Popular Electronic Library 
Catalog, Dies

By SCOTT CARLSON

If you have gone into a library and found it easy to look up 
books in the catalog, or even to find out what a library in 
another town has on its shelves, you owe a debt of gratitude to 
Frederick G. Kilgour. Mr. Kilgour, who founded the 
library-network organization that became OCLC Online Computer 
Library Center, died on Monday. He was 92.

Mr. Kilgour's work at OCLC included the development of WorldCat, 
a catalog that now comprises about 70 million items and is used 
by libraries in countries around the world. When WorldCat was 
being developed in the early 1970s, most libraries relied on card 
catalogs. WorldCat allowed libraries to share bibliographic 
entries, thus eliminating the tedious and costly efforts of each 
library typing up records for each of its books. WorldCat also 
allowed libraries to establish links between collections, making 
interlibrary loans easier.

Before moving to Ohio to run OCLC in 1967, Mr. Kilgour had been 
the head librarian of the Yale medical library. In 1961, he 
helped establish a prototype computerized library catalog system 
for medical libraries at Columbia University, Harvard University, 
and Yale.

"He is certainly a giant of his time," said Duane E. Webster, 
executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, 
adding that Mr. Kilgour had taken OCLC from a local organization 
to "the bibliographic data center of the world."

"He did this at a time when everyone looked to the Library of 
Congress to create, manage, provide, and support all of those 
services that OCLC has eventually taken over," Mr. Webster said. 
"It's hard to imagine the scope of his vision unless you came 
through this period when everybody assumed that our challenge was 
to get Congress to put more money into the Library of Congress to 
solve these problems and deliver services. He said it's foolish 
to keep knocking our heads against that wall -- let's create a 
partnership amongst ourselves."

Mr. Kilgour "moved libraries into networking well before the 
Internet," Mr. Webster said.

Michael Gorman, the dean of library services at California State 
University at Fresno and the immediate past president of the 
American Library Association, said Mr. Kilgour was "the 
godfather" of library automation.

"You cannot overstate his impact on library automation, on 
cooperation between libraries, on the prevalence of online 
catalogs, and so on," Mr. Gorman said. "I reviewed his collected 
papers once, and I was really struck by the remarkable scope of 
his knowledge."

Mr. Kilgour was involved with librarianship until very recently, 
having been a professor of library and information science at the 
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until 2004.

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