The Pioneers: Frederick G. Kilgour (1914–2006) — Phil Schieber

In 1966, Frederick G. Kilgour wrote: “Libraries now find themselves forced to a dynamic state of instability, which should not be confused with insecurity. Since the age of Pericles, the unstable periods in human history have been the most productive periods. Certainly the period of instability into which libraries are now entering after a long period of changelessness will be one of the intellectually productive periods in librarianship.” [1]

A year later, on July 5, 1967, Kilgour launched a new organization into what would indeed become not only a period of prolonged instability for librarianship, but one of extraordinary innovation and adaptation.

In 1965, Kilgour and Ralph Parker were hired as consultants by the Ohio College Association (OCA), a group of presidents of Ohio’s colleges and universities, to evaluate two proposals from commercial firms. The first was to construct a union catalog of holdings in Ohio’s academic libraries using a microform technique. The second was to create a central computerized catalog of such holdings. The consultants recommended rejection of both proposals and instead offered a third, which they described as a group of libraries organized into “one total information system by using computers and associated equipment.” [2]

At the time, Parker was Director of Libraries at the University of Missouri. He had been involved in early automation projects there involving a punched–card circulation system and was recognized as one of the leading authorities on library automation. Similarly, Kilgour was Librarian of the Yale Medical Library, and he, too, was recognized as an authority on library automation. In 1961, he was one of the leaders in developing a prototype computerized library catalog system for the medical libraries at Columbia, Harvard and Yale Universities.

The OCA accepted the proposal from Kilgour and Parker and ended up hiring Kilgour as the head of a new organization called the Ohio College Library Center. In 1967, Kilgour was 53 years old and had worked in libraries most of his life.

Early career

Kilgour entered Harvard College in 1931. He worked his way through school, washing dishes in the Harvard Law School eating club, and eventually serving as a student assistant in the Widener Library, where he caught the eye of Keyes Metcalf, the Harvard College Librarian. Kilgour completed his undergraduate degree in chemistry in 1935. He had once considered going to medical school, but abandoned that notion for economic reasons. The Great Depression was on, he needed a job, and he had to provide support for his mother and grandfather. He took a full–time job as assistant to Metcalf at the Harvard University Library. He began experimenting in automating library procedures, primarily the use of punched cards for a circulation system. Kilgour later noted:

“I was a chemist when I went into librarianship. I had a scientific background. And, my feeling was, at least at Harvard at that time, that decisions made in the library had nothing to do with any data … And it just seemed to me that there was room for somebody with a scientific attitude in mind to make a contribution to libraries. So that I was well prepared when the computer came along to recognize that it really was the instrument of choice for processing information.”[3]

Kilgour published his first article in 1938 in the Harvard Library Bulletin. “Microphotography” described how that nascent technology could “lower the economic barrier between the scholar and his resources.” [4] In 1939 he published an article in Library Journal, entitled “A New Punched Card for Circulation Records.” The system he devised enabled Harvard Library to reduce annual expenses by $3,500 (in 1939 U.S. dollars) and accomplish the same level of work with fewer people. Increasing access to information and reducing library costs were to become familiar themes in Kilgour’s writings and work in librarianship.

While working in the library, Kilgour also began graduate study under George Sarton in the new discipline of the history of science. He published scholarly papers with such titles as: “Professor John Winthrop’s Notes on Sun Spot Observations (1739);” “The Rise of Scientific Activity in Colonial New England;” and “Harvey’s Use of Galen’s Findings In His Discovery of the Circulation of Blood.”

Kilgour built a collection of microfilmed foreign newspapers to give scholars access to newspapers from abroad. In 1940, he published an article, “Typography in Celluloid,” in the Christian Science Monitor Weekly Magazine Section (September 14, 1940, pp. 8–9), which, combined with his work with foreign newspapers and microfilm, brought him to the attention of government officials in Washington, D.C.

OSS and State Department

From 1942 to 1945, with a commission as a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Kilgour joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He served as Executive Secretary and Acting Chairman of the U.S. government’s Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC). In that capacity, he developed and directed a system for obtaining publications from enemy nations and enemy–occupied areas. The IDC had a staff of 150, with about 50 members based in outposts around the world. The IDC obtained Japanese “News for Sailors” reports listing mine fields, which were then forwarded to U.S. submarines in the Pacific theater. The IDC also gathered obituary notices in 60 German daily newspapers which were used to develop casualty statistics. For his wartime service, he was awarded the Legion of Merit. From 1946 to 1948, following a reorganization of the OSS, he served as deputy director in the Office of Intelligence Collection and Dissemination in the U.S. Department of State.

Yale Medical Library

In 1948, Kilgour returned to academe. He became Librarian of the Yale Medical Library. As a member of the History Department, he lectured on this history of science and medicine and published many scholarly articles on those topics. He also began publishing articles on library use and effectiveness.

In the Yale Medical Library Annual Report, 1950/51, Kilgour predicted that “it is very likely that libraries will in some way in the next half century begin to make use of magnetic, electronic or other types of memory units for handing and producing information.” Five years later, in the Annual Report, he shortened the time span in which his prediction would be realized from 50 years to just a few: “Information theory holds out the possibility of retrieving information per se and not just as bibliographic units with which libraries have by and large been forced to concern themselves. The Library has observed with great interest these developments over the past half dozen years and hopes to be able to take advantage of some of them in the next few years.”[5] In 1961, Kilgour was one of the leaders in development of a prototype computerized library catalog system for the medical libraries at Columbia, Harvard and Yale Universities. In 1965 he was named Associate Librarian for Research and Development at Yale University, where he continued to conduct experiments in library automation.

During the early 1960s Kilgour became a well–known speaker on information technology and library automation. In his professional writings, he pointed out that the explosion of research information was placing new demands on libraries to furnish information completely and rapidly. He advocated using the computer to eliminate human repetitive tasks from library procedures.

At an IBM symposium on scientific computing in 1966, he noted that libraries could not only use the computer to prepare catalog cards, but that the same information could be used for real–time applications such as an online union catalog that would enable a user to rapidly search multiple catalogs of libraries. Mechanization of the library’s cataloging processes would result in computerization of the user’s activity and “immensely increase the efficiency of the borrower’s use of the library.” [6]

Clearly, Kilgour’s experiences at Yale shaped his thinking as he approached the formation of the Ohio College Library Center and the development of it s computer system and network.

OCLC Years

Kilgour was not only a pioneer in library automation, however. To OCLC, he brought skills as a librarian, educator and entrepreneur.

As a librarian, he knew how libraries worked, and he could speak with librarians in their language. He could discuss the subfields in an LC–MARC II record with the most detail–oriented catalogers. He was at home discussing library workflows, budgets and policies with library directors. As an historian and scholar, he related easily with university presidents and provosts and faculty. He knew how faculty members worked and how their institutions worked. As an entrepreneur, he knew how to overcome inertia and build not only a business, but also an institution united by common purposes.

In July 1967, the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) consisted of Kilgour and a secretary, housed in office space in the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library of The Ohio State University. OSU also provided computer room space in its research center. From there, the computer revolution in libraries got under way.

On August 26, 1971, after four years of development, OCLC introduced its online union catalog and shared cataloging system. Alden Library, Ohio University, was the first institution to do online cataloging. On that first day, staff there were able to catalog 133 books online. That first night, back in Columbus, the OCLC computer room was struck by lightning. The first year it used OCLC, Ohio University increased the number of books it cataloged by a third, while it reduced its staff by 17 positions through attrition.

Word of Kilgour’s invention spread rapidly across the campuses of the United States. The online union catalog and shared cataloging system, while a complex computer system, indeed, was simple and elegant in concept. The catalogs of Ohio academic libraries would be merged through a computer network and database, creating an electronic card catalog. This shared catalog would provide cataloging information about all the libraries in the network. For the first time, a librarian or patron at OSU could determine if Oberlin had a particular book and vice versa.

Libraries either used the cataloging information that already existed in the database, or they put it in themselves for other libraries to use. Thus, only one library had to originally catalog an item, and the other libraries used that cataloging information, thereby greatly reducing duplication of effort and costs. Libraries also ordered custom–printed catalog cards, which arrived in libraries already sorted and ready for filing (a further labor–saving feature). OCLC card production peaked at 131 million cards per year in 1985, and by 2009 had declined to 1.6 million since most libraries had shut down their card catalogs and adopted online public access catalogs.

In 1979, under Kilgour’s leadership, OCLC introduced an interlibrary loan subsystem, which over the next 30 years, enabled libraries to arrange 204 million interlibrary loan transactions. That same year, Kilgour established the OCLC Office of Research, which in the early 1980s experimented with electronic publishing and the home delivery of library services through cable television. Today, OCLC Research pursues a broad agenda designed to extend the value of libraries, archives and museums.

The creation of the online union catalog, known today as WorldCat, was not only an important technological achievement, but an impressive organizational one as well. Kilgour established OCLC as a non–profit membership organization and led the creation of a governance structure that gave individual members an institutionalized voice and role in the governance of the cooperative. He forged a financial philosophy for OCLC that according to the first annual report “calls for each institution to pay for operational costs prorated on the amount of use each member makes of the system.” [7] Today, OCLC funds all of its operations—and much research and development—with those revenues. OCLC does not receive government appropriations, membership fees, or foundation funding to support operations.

Kilgour led OCLC from 1967 to 1980 and presided over OCLC’s growth from an intrastate network to a national network. During his tenure, OCLC grew from two persons with revenues of $67,000 to a staff of 500 and revenues of $27 million. The number of libraries grew from the 54 original Ohio members to 2,300 libraries in all 50 states, and the number of records in the OCLC bibliographic database grew from zero to five million.

Later Years

After stepping down as president of OCLC in 1980, Kilgour continued to engage in research at OCLC. A pet project was EIDOS (Electronic Information Delivery Online System). The EIDOS prototype enabled a library user to search for a book, browse its tale of contents and index pages and then request the actual text and graphics. These electronic books would be maintained online at OCLC. EIDOS was launched in 1986, well before the World Wide Web was invented. In 1998, Oxford University Press published Kilgour’s The Evolution of the Book, in which he examined 5,000 years of history of writing and publishing, from clay tablets to electronic books.

In 1990, Kilgour was named Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Information and Library Science, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and served on the faculty until his retirement in 2004 at the age of 90. He was the author of 205 scholarly papers and was the founder and first editor of the journal Information Technology and Libraries. His other works included: Engineering in History; The Library of the Medical Institution of Yale College and its Catalogue of 1865; and the Library and Information Science CumIndex.

Kilgour made important contributions to librarianship during the period of instability that he predicted in 1966. At his death forty years later, he was widely recognized as one of the leading figures in twentieth century librarianship.

In 1978, in presenting Kilgour with the American Library Association’s prestigious Melvil Dewey Medal, it was noted that “he may even have out–Deweyed Dewey.” Indeed, four years later, in a more serious tone, ALA awarded him Honorary Life Membership. The citation read:

 

“In recognition of his successful pioneering efforts to master technology in the service of librarianship; the acuity of his vision that helped to introduce the most modern and powerful technologies into the practice of librarianship; the establishment and development of a practical vehicle for making the benefits of technology readily available to thousands of libraries; his long and distinguished career as a practicing librarian; his voluminous, scholarly and prophetic writings; and above all his fostering the means for ensuring the economic viability of libraries, the American Library Association hereby cites Frederick Gridley Kilgour as scholar, entrepreneur, innovator, and interpreter of technology steadfastly committed to the preservation of humanistic values.”

 

Frederick G. Kilgour
Awards and Recognition

Notes

1. Frederick G. Kilgour, “Implications for the Future of Reference Information,” in Proceedings of the Conference held at the School of Library Service, Columbia University, March 20–April 1, 1966.

2. Ralph H. Parker and Frederick G. Kilgour, “Report to the Committee of Librarians of the Ohio College Association,” in Collected Papers of Frederick G. Kilgour, OCLC Years. (Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, 1984), 1.

3. “An Interview with OCLC Founder Fred Kilgour.” VHS. (Dublin, OH: OCLC Video Communications Program, January 1990).

4. Frederick G. Kilgour, “Microphotography,” in Collected Papers of Frederick G. Kilgour, OCLC Years. (Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, 1984), 1.

5. “Yale Medical Library, Report of Frederick G. Kilgour, Librarian, 30 June 1956,” in Collected Papers of Frederick G. Kilgour, Early Years. (Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, 1984), 1.

6. Frederick G. Kilgour, “Computer Applications in Biomedical Libraries,” in Collected Papers of Frederick G. Kilgour, Early Years (Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, 1984), 302.

7. Ohio College Library Center, Annual Report 1967/68. (Columbus, OH: Ohio College Library Center, 1968), 4.

About the author

Phil Schieber is Director, Corporate Communications, at OCLC.