OCLC is a non-profit, membership, computer library service and researchorganization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information andreducing the rate of the rise in library costs

Even OCLC, one ofthe very best retrospective-conversion contractors in the business, isbound to make thousands of typos in the course of a huge projectlike the Harvard “recon.”

OCLC owns the largestdatabase of bibliographic information in the world, and it oers aservice called RETROCON, contracting with libraries to transfer oldcatalog cards to “machine-readable form,” at anywhere from ftycents to six dollars per card.

cards printed by theLibrary of Congress, Baker & Taylor, and OCLC;

THE COURT: How would you define a catalog?MS. MARTINEZ: So it depends, I think, on thesubscriber, because they can be different, but initiallywhen -- before a customer comes to WorldCat, obviously, theywill have their own records that haven't been touched orenhanced or cared for through the WorldCat process.

While libraries pay substantial fees to OCLC and other providers for services including deduplication, discovery, and enhancement, they do not do so with the intent that their records should then be siloed or restricted from re-use. Regardless of who has contributed to descriptive records, individual records are generally not copyrightable, nor is it in the public interest for their use to be restricted.

OCLC began automated catalog card production in 1971, when the shared cataloging system first went online. Cardproduction increased to its peak in 1985, when OCLC printed 131 million. At peak production, OCLC routinelyshipped 8 tons of cards each week, or some 4,000 packages. Card production steadily decreased since then asmore and more libraries began replacing their printed cards with electronic catalogs. OCLC has printed more than1.9 billion catalog cards since 1971.

OCLC built the world's first online shared cataloging system in 1971

DUBLIN, Ohio, October 1, 2015 —OCLC printed its last library catalog cards today, officially closing the book onwhat was once a familiar resource for generations of information seekers who now use computer catalogs andonline search engines to access library collections around the world.

in 1971, the Ohio College Library Center began printing the text onto the index cards for them.

One year ago this month, the final order of library catalog cards was printed by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) in Dublin, Ohio. On October 2, 2015, The Columbus Dispatch wrote, “Shortly before 3 p.m. Thursday, an era ended. About a dozen people gathered in a basement workroom to watch as a machine printed the final sheets of library catalog cards to be made …”

We attempted this, but ran into the problem that OCLC does not identify books as publishers do (OCLC is far less reliant on ISBNs). Thus the mapping to WorldCat was only partly successful.