Frederick G. Kilgour

KILGOUR Frederick G. Kilgour, a distinguished librarian who nearly 40 years ago transformed a consortium of Ohio libraries into what is now the largest library cooperative in the world, making the catalogs of thousands of libraries around the globe instantly accessible to far-flung patrons, died Monday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 92. The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, said Bob Murphy, a spokesman for Dublin, Ohio-based Online Computer Library Center, the nonprofit cooperative Kilgour founded in 1967. The cooperative, known to librarians everywhere simply as OCLC, oversees a vast computerized database that comprises the catalogs of some 10,000 libraries around the world - more than a billion items - available to anyone who walks into a participating library and logs on to a computer terminal. Kilgour was a Massachusetts native and Harvard graduate who worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. After leaving government service, Kilgour was a librarian and administrator at Yale University. In 1967, he moved to central Ohio after being hired by the Ohio College Association to develop OCLC, which pooled the catalogs of 54 academic libraries in the state. Introduced in 1971, OCLC was expanded to libraries outside Ohio in 1977. Kilgour was OCLC's president and executive director from 1967 to 1980. Kilgour is survived by his wife Eleanor, three daughters, two grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.