Re: F. Kilgour in CHE

["\"FrederickFriend\"" <ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk>]

Fred Kilgour did indeed make a very valuable contribution to 
services to library users, and I can provide one small example 
from my knowledge of this great man. In 1979 or 1980, when 
Librarian of the University of Essex, I invited Fred to talk to 
us at Essex about the possibility of joining the OCLC cataloguing 
service. I expected Fred to say that we would have to adopt 
US-style catalogue cards, but Fred agreed to set up a special 
production run at OCLC to maintain the Essex sheaf catalogue. A 
cynic might say that it was the price Fred was willing to pay to 
get a UK customer, but I knew from talking to Fred that he was 
genuine in his wish to help librarians and library users to adapt 
to automated cataloguing procedures by retaining what was 
familiar to them. Essex and Newcastle were the first UK 
universities to join OCLC, even though in the early days we could 
not start cataloguing until 3 p.m. UK time, when the US service 
started.

Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
E-mail ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk

----- Original Message -----
From: "James J. O'Donnell" <jod@georgetown.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2006 10:55 PM
Subject: F. Kilgour in CHE


> 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.
>
> ####