Online Tribute to OCLC Founder and Library Pioneer Frederick Kilgour

Next Tuesday, October 31, 2006, there will be a tribute to Frederick G. Kilgour, the librarian who founded OCLC in 1967.

Kilgour, a pioneer of library automation and the creator of the planet's largest online catalogue Worldcat, died this summer.

"The program will include remarks by William Crowe, member of the OCLC Board of Trustees; Ernie Ingles, President, OCLC Members Council; José Marie Griffiths, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Marilee Chinnici-Zuercher, Mayor of the City of Dublin; and Jay Jordan, President and CEO, OCLC. There will also be video tributes from library leaders in Taiwan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, and video excerpts of interviews with Mr. Kilgour".

The webcast of the event will be available on the OCLC website as of October 31st.

See also the Library Boy post of August 2, 2006 entitled The "Patron Saints" of Our Profession:

"We don’t often celebrate the 'patron saints' of our profession, the people who laid the intellectual foundations of what we do everyday. Panizzi, Dewey, Cutter, Lubetzky, Ranganathan, Garfield, Vannevar Bush, Vincent Cerf. And Kilgour.When you stop to think of it, we would be drowning in one huge mess had it not been for our predecessors who came up with the rules for cataloguing, the field of citation analysis, the logic of hypertext or the structure for OCLC."