And the brilliance of Kilgour’s enterprise was that if the cataloguer did not find a record, she could undertake to describe the book herself, and contribute her work to the system as a “master record” for that book, for the good of all members. She wrote a sort of poem, following a set of rules more rigorous than a villanelle’s; she sent it off to people in Ohio who published it for her; and then she got paid a few dollars—in the form of a cataloguing credit against fixture O.C.L.C. charges. The more fresh “copy” a cataloguing department offered O.C.L.C., the cheaper its use of O.C.L.C. was, and thus there was plenty of incentive for all libraries, engaged in the creation of a kind of virtual community long before there were such things as the Internet, to pump up the burgeoning database. What began mainly as a handy, unilateral way of delivering the Library of Congress MARC files to member libraries turned into a highly democratic, omnidirectional collaboration among hundreds of thousands of once isolated documentalists: currently, there are close to thirty million records in the database, only a quarter of which originally came from the Library of Congress, the majority being the work of seven thousand member libraries.
OCLC's original arrangement could also make an interesting sort of model for academic publishing in a general sense.