Historical Note: A Personalized Prehistory of OCLC

Abstract

Fifty years ago as the American Documentation Institute (ADI) was coming into being unbeknownst to me, I read a stimulating article by Ralph H. Parker, then Loan Librarian at the University of Texas Library, Austin [1]. Parker had developed and installed on February 1, 1936, the first library system based on Hollerith punched cards. Like the Harvard College Library, where I was working, the University of Texas Library had had, as Parker put it, "Multifarious files...