Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham is a city located in the north central region of the U. S. state of Alabama. With an estimated 2017 population of 210,710, it is the most populous city in Alabama. Birmingham is the seat of Alabama's most populous and fifth largest county; as of 2017, the Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 1,149,807, making it the most populous in Alabama and 49th-most populous in the United States. Birmingham serves as an important regional hub and is associated with the Deep South and Appalachian regions of the nation. Birmingham was founded in 1871, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, through the merger of three pre-existing farm towns, most notably Elyton; the new city was named for Birmingham, the UK's second largest city and, at the time, a major industrial city. The Alabama city annexed smaller neighbors and developed as an industrial center, based on mining, the new iron and steel industry, rail transport. Most of the original settlers who founded Birmingham were of English ancestry.
The city was developed as a place where cheap, non-unionized immigrant labor, along with African-American labor from rural Alabama, could be employed in the city's steel mills and blast furnaces, giving it a competitive advantage over unionized industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast. From its founding through the end of the 1960s, Birmingham was a primary industrial center of the southern United States, its growth from 1881 through 1920 earned it nicknames such as "The Magic City" and "The Pittsburgh of the South". Its major industries were steel production. Major components of the railroad industry and railroad cars, were manufactured in Birmingham. Since the 1860s, the two primary hubs of railroading in the "Deep South" have been Birmingham and Atlanta; the economy diversified in the latter half of the 20th century. Banking, telecommunications, electrical power transmission, medical care, college education, insurance have become major economic activities. Birmingham ranks as one of the largest banking centers in the U.
S. Also, it is among the most important business centers in the Southeast. In higher education, Birmingham has been the location of the University of Alabama School of Medicine and the University of Alabama School of Dentistry since 1947. In 1969 it gained the University of Alabama at Birmingham, one of three main campuses of the University of Alabama System, it is home to three private institutions: Samford University, Birmingham-Southern College, Miles College. The Birmingham area has major colleges of medicine, optometry, physical therapy, law and nursing; the city has three of the state's five law schools: Cumberland School of Law, Birmingham School of Law, Miles Law School. Birmingham is the headquarters of the Southwestern Athletic Conference and the Southeastern Conference, one of the major U. S. collegiate athletic conferences. Birmingham was founded on June 1, 1871, by the Elyton Land Company, whose investors included cotton planters and railroad entrepreneurs, it sold lots near the planned crossing of the Alabama & Chattanooga and South & North Alabama railroads, including land, a part of the Benjamin P. Worthington plantation.
The first business at that crossroads was the trading post and country store operated by Marre and Allen. The site of the railroad crossing was notable for its proximity to nearby deposits of iron ore and limestone – the three main raw materials used in making steel. Birmingham is the only place where significant amounts of all three minerals can be found in close proximity. From the start the new city was planned as a center of industry; the city's founders, organized as the Elyton Land Company, named it in honor of Birmingham, one of the world's premier industrial cities, to emphasize that point. The growth of the planned city was impeded by an outbreak of cholera and a Wall Street crash in 1873. Soon afterward, however, it began to develop at an explosive rate; the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company became the leading steel producer in the South by 1892. In 1907 U. S. Steel became the most important political and economic force in Birmingham, it resisted new industry, however. In 1911, the town of Elyton and several other surrounding towns were absorbed into Birmingham.
From the early 20th century, the city grew so it earned the sobriquet "The Magic City". The downtown was redeveloped from a low-rise commercial and residential district into a busy grid of neoclassical mid- and high-rise buildings crisscrossed by streetcar lines. Between 1902 and 1912, four large office buildings were constructed at the intersection of 20th Street, the central north-south spine of the city, 1st Avenue North, which connected the warehouses and industrial facilities along the east-west railroad corridor; this early group of skyscrapers was nicknamed the "Heaviest Corner on Earth". Birmingham was hit by the 1916 Irondale earthquake. A few buildings in the area were damaged; the earthquake was felt as far as Atlanta and neighboring states. While excluded from the best-paying industrial jobs, African Americans joined the migration of residents from rural areas to the city, drawn by economic opportunity; the Great Depression of the 1930s struck Birmingham hard, as the sources of capital fueling the city's growth dried up at the same time farm laborers, driven off the land, made their way to the city in search of work.
Hundreds poured into many riding in empty boxcars. "Hobo jungles" were established in Boyles, the Twenty-fourth Street Viaduct, G
Open Society Foundations
Open Society Foundations the Open Society Institute, is an international grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, public health and independent media; the group's name is inspired by Karl Popper's 1945 book Its Enemies. The OSF has branches in 37 countries, encompassing a group of country and regional foundations, such as the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa. In 2018, OSF announced it was closing its European office in Budapest and moving to Berlin, in response to legislation passed by the Hungarian Government targeting the foundation's activities. Since its establishment in 1993, OSF has reported expenditures in excess of $11 billion in grants towards NGOs, aligned with the organisation's mission. In January 2019, Soros called China's Xi Jinping the most dangerous enemy of free societies, saying: "China is not the only authoritarian regime in the world but it is the wealthiest and technologically most advanced" and "present an unacceptable security risk for the rest of the world".
On May 28, 1984, Soros signed a contract between the Soros Foundation and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the founding document of the Soros Foundation Budapest. This was followed by several foundations in the region to help countries move away from communism. In 1991 the foundation merged with the Fondation pour une Entraide Intellectuelle Européenne, an affiliate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, created in 1966 to imbue'non-conformist' Eastern European scientists with anti-totalitarian and capitalist ideas. Open Society Institute was created in the United States in 1993 to support the Soros foundations in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In August 2010, it started using the name Open Society Foundations to better reflect its role as a benefactor for civil society groups in countries around the world. Soros believes there can be no absolute answers to political questions because the same principle of reflexivity applies as in financial markets. In 2012, Christopher Stone joined the OSF as the second president.
He replaced Aryeh Neier, who served as president from 1993 to 2012. Stone announced in September 2017. In January 2018, Patrick Gaspard was appointed president of the Open Society Foundations. In 2016, the OSF was the target of a cyber security breach. Documents and information belonging to the OSF were published by a website; the cyber security breach has been described as sharing similarities with Russian-linked cyberattacks that targeted other institutions, such as the Democratic National Committee. In 2017, Soros transferred $18 billion to the Foundation; the Open Society Foundations reported annual expenditures of $827 million in 2014. Its $873 million budget in 2013, ranked as the second largest private philanthropy budget in the United States, after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation budget of $3.9 billion. According to the foundations' website, 1993–2014 expenditures included: $2.9 billion to defend human rights the rights of women. Expenditures in 2014 included: $277.3 million - Rights and Justice $238.0 million - Governance and Accountability $116.0 million - Administration $91.7 million - Education and Youth $60.0 million - Health $43.8 million - Media and Information.
Within these totals, OSF reported granting at least $33 million to civil rights and social justice organizations in the United States. This funding included groups such as the Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment that supported protests in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the death of Eric Garner, the shooting of Tamir Rice and the shooting of Michael Brown. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the OSF spends much of its resources on democratic causes around the world, has contributed to groups such as the Tides Foundation. OSF has been a major financial supporter of U. S. immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. OSF projects have included the National Security and Human Rights Campaign and the Lindesmith Center, which conducted research on drug reform; the Library of Congress Soros Foundation Visiting Fellows Program was initiated in 1990. In 2007, Nicolas Guilhot wrote in Critical Sociology that the Open Society Foundations serve to perpetuate institutions that reinforce the existing social order, as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation have done before them.
Guilhot argues that control over the social sciences by moneyed interests has depoliticized this field and reinforced a capitalist view of modernization. An OSF effort in 2008 in the African Great Lakes region aimed at spreading human rights awareness among prostitutes in Uganda and other nations in the area was not received well by the Ugandan authorities, who considered it an effort to legalize and legitimize prostitution. Open Society Foundation has been criticized in pro-Israel editorials, Tablet Magazine, Arutz Sheva and Jewish Press, for including
H. W. Wilson Company
The H. W. Wilson Company, Inc. is a publisher and indexing company, founded in 1898 and is located in The Bronx, New York. It provides print and digital content aimed at patrons of public school and professional libraries in both the United States and internationally; the company provides indexing services that include text, retrospective and indexing, as well other types of databases. Image gallery indexing includes art cinema; the company indexed reference monographs. An online retrieval system with various features, including language translation, is available; the company merged with EBSCO Publishing in June 2011. Grey House Publishing publishes print editions of H. W. Wilson products under license; the H. W. Wilson Company was founded in 1898 by Halsey William Wilson, a student working his way through the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Together with his roommate, Henry S. Morris, Wilson started a book selling business serving educators and students at the university; when it was time for Morris to graduate, he sold his share of the business to Wilson.
The H. W. Wilson Company's first original reference title was the Cumulative Book Index, first published in 1898; this was followed by the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature in 1901. In 1911, Wilson relocated the company to White New York, to be nearer to its main markets. By 1917, demand for more specialized indexes had grown to the point where the company had to move again. Wilson bought a five-story building in The Bronx on the banks of the Harlem River; the building's distinctive lighthouse was added in 1929. On June 2, 2011, H. W. Wilson Company merged with EBSCO Publishing. Staff at the Dublin office of the company went to the Labour Court in Ireland and protested at EBSCO's failure to abide by its recommendations; the company published some print references, such as Facts About the Presidents, Famous First Facts, the monthly magazine Current Biography. The John Cotton Dana Award, sponsored by H. W. Wilson, honors outstanding library public relations, whether a summer reading program, a year-long centennial celebration, fundraising for a new college library, an awareness campaign, or an innovative partnership in the community.
Award winners receive a cash development grant of $5,000 from the H. W. Wilson Foundation; the awards are presented at a reception hosted by H. W. Wilson Company, held during the American Library Association's annual conference. H. W. Wilson Company's applied sciences indexing encompasses services under the title Applied Science & Technology; these are "abstracts", "full text", "retrospective". Broad subject coverage includes the major scientific disciplines and their respective sub disciplines in abstracts or full text. For example, topical coverage includes acoustics and earth sciences, geological sciences, food industry, textile industry and waste management; the retrospective indexing of Applied Science and Technology covers more than 1,350 periodicals from 1913 to 1983. Applied Science & Technology covers over 780 periodicals, as well as sources such as conference proceedings and directories. H. W. Wilson Company's indexing pertaining to art encompasses "Art Abstracts", "Art Full Text", "Art Index", "Art Index Retrospective: 1929-1984".
It includes 304 full-text journals that focus on fine art, decorative art, commercial art, folk art, film and other areas. Subjects covered include art history and criticism and architectural history, antiques, museum studies, graphic arts, industrial design, landscape architecture, interior design, folk art, photography, sculpture, decorative arts, costume design, video, motion pictures, advertising art, non-western art and other related subjects. WilsonWeb is "an online based information retrieval system that offers an interface, multiple search modes, interactive help messages, text translation into various languages". "A Modern-Day Scriptorium" By Ernest Rubinstein. The Chronicle Review. January 10, 2014. Official website The H. W. Wilson Company History Overview and history of The H. W. Wilson Company, Inc. About WilsonWeb. Nova Southeastern University. 2013
Ipswich, Massachusetts
Ipswich is a coastal town in Essex County, United States. The population was 13,175 at the 2010 census. Home to Willowdale State Forest and Sandy Point State Reservation, Ipswich includes the southern part of Plum Island. A residential community with a vibrant tourism industry, the town is famous for its clams, celebrated annually at the Ipswich Chowderfest, for Crane Beach, a barrier beach near the Crane estate. Ipswich was incorporated as a town in 1634. Ipswich was founded by John Winthrop the Younger, son of John Winthrop, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 and its first governor, elected in England in 1629. Several hundred colonists sailed from England in 1630 in a fleet of 11 ships, including Winthrop's flagship, the Arbella. Investigating the region of Salem and Cape Ann, they entertained aboard the Arbella for a day, June 12, 1630, a native chief of the lands to the north, Chief Masconomet; the event was recorded in Winthrop's journal on the 13th, but Winthrop did not say how they overcame the language barrier.
The name they heard from Masconomet concerning the country over which he ruled has been reconstructed as Wonnesquamsauke, which the English promptly rendered into the anglicized "Agawam". The colonists, sailed to the south where some buildings had been prepared for them at a place newly named Charlestown; that winter they lost a few hundred colonists from disease. They experienced their first nor'easter, which cost them some fingers and toes, as well as houses destroyed by the fires they kept burning day and night. Just as Winthrop was handing out the last handful of grain, the supply ship Lyon entered Boston Harbor. John now sent for his family in England, but his wife, her children, his eldest son, whose mother was the elder John's first wife, Mary Forth, did not arrive until November, on the Lyon. John the Younger resided with his father and stepmother until 1633, when he resolved to settle in Agawam, with the permission of the General Court of Massachusetts. Captain John Smith had written about the Angoam or Aggawom region in 1614, referring to it as "an excellent habitation, being a good and safe harbour."
There is no record of any native resistance to the colonization either at Charlestown or at Agawam though estimates of the earlier populations run into the thousands. A plague of 1616–1618 and again in the early 1630s smallpox brought from abroad, had devastated the once populous Indian tribes; the fields stood vacant. The colonists encountered but few natives. John the Younger and 12 men aboard a shallop took up residence there. Two men continued up the river to a large meadow. Agawam was incorporated on August 5, 1634, as Ipswich, after Ipswich in the county of Suffolk, England; the name "Ipswich" was taken "in acknowledgment of the great honor and kindness done to our people which took shipping there." Nathaniel Ward, an assistant pastor in town from 1634 to 1636, wrote the first code of laws for Massachusetts and published the religious/political work, The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America in England. Pioneers would become farmers, shipbuilders or traders; the tidal Ipswich River provided water power for mills, salt marshes supplied hay for livestock.
A cottage industry in lace-making developed. But in 1687, Ipswich residents, led by the Reverend John Wise, protested a tax imposed by the governor, Sir Edmund Andros; as Englishmen, they argued, taxation without representation was unacceptable. Citizens were jailed, but Andros was recalled to England in 1689, the new British sovereigns, William III and Mary II, issued colonists another charter; the rebellion is the reason the town calls itself the "Birthplace of American Independence". Great clipper ships of the 19th century, bypassed Ipswich in favor of the deep-water seaports at Salem, Newburyport and Boston; the town remained a fishing and farming community, its residents living in older homes they could not afford to replace—leaving Ipswich with a considerable inventory of early architecture. In 1822, a stocking manufacturing machine, smuggled out of England arrived at Ipswich, violating a British ban on exporting such technology, the community developed as a mill town. In 1828, the Ipswich Female Seminary was founded.
In 1868, Amos A. Lawrence established the Ipswich Hosiery Mills beside the river, it would expand into the largest stocking mill in the country by the turn of the 20th century. What may be the last witchcraft trial in North America was held in Ipswich in 1878. In the Ipswich witchcraft trial, a member of the Christian Science religion was accused of using his mental powers to harm others, including a spinster living in the town; the town government was reformed in 1950 with the acceptance of the Town Manager Charter. This charter was rescinded by the voters, lost again, the present Town Manager-Selectmen Charter was adopted by the voters in 1967. In 2012 Ipswich hired its first female Town Manager, Robin Crosbie, who served until her retirement in 2018. In 1910, Richard T. Crane, Jr. of Chicago, the business magnate owner of Crane Plumbing, bought Castle Hill, a drumlin on Ipswich Bay. He hired Olmsted Brothers, successors to Frederick Law Olmsted, to landscape his 3,500-acre estate, engaged the Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge to design an Italian Renaissance-Revival style villa on the summit.
A grande allée, 160 feet wide and lined with statuary, would run the half mile from house to sea. But his wife, loathed the building. Crane promised. True
Forbes
Forbes is an American business magazine. Published bi-weekly, it features original articles on finance, industry and marketing topics. Forbes reports on related subjects such as technology, science and law, its headquarters is located in New Jersey. Primary competitors in the national business magazine category include Fortune and Bloomberg Businessweek; the magazine is well known for its lists and rankings, including of the richest Americans, of the world's top companies, The World's Billionaires. The motto of Forbes magazine is "The Capitalist Tool", its chair and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes, its CEO is Mike Federle. It was sold to Integrated Whale Media Investments. B. C. Forbes, a financial columnist for the Hearst papers, his partner Walter Drey, the general manager of the Magazine of Wall Street, founded Forbes magazine on September 15, 1917. Forbes provided the money and the name and Drey provided the publishing expertise; the original name of the magazine was Forbes: Devoted to Doings.
Drey became vice-president of the B. C. Forbes Publishing Company, while B. C. Forbes became editor-in-chief, a post he held until his death in 1954. B. C. Forbes was assisted in his years by his two eldest sons, Bruce Charles Forbes and Malcolm Stevenson Forbes. Bruce Forbes took over on his father's death, his strengths lay in streamlining operations and developing marketing. During his tenure, 1954–1964, the magazine's circulation nearly doubled. On Bruce's death, his brother Malcolm Stevenson "Steve" Forbes Jr. became President and Chief executive of Forbes and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes magazine. Between 1961 and 1999 the magazine was edited by James Michaels. In 1993, under Michaels, Forbes was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. In 2006, an investment group Elevation Partners that includes rock star Bono bought a minority interest in the company with a reorganization, through a new company, Forbes Media LLC, in which Forbes Magazine and Forbes.com, along with other media properties, is now a part.
A 2009 New York Times report said: "40 percent of the enterprise was sold... for a reported $300 million, setting the value of the enterprise at $750 million". Three years Mark M. Edmiston of AdMedia Partners observed, "It's not worth half of that now", it was revealed that the price had been US$264 million. In January 2010, Forbes reached an agreement to sell its headquarters building Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to New York University; the company's headquarters subsequently moved to the Newport section of downtown Jersey City, New Jersey, in 2014. In November 2013, Forbes Media, which publishes Forbes magazine, was put up for sale; this was encouraged by minority shareholders Elevation Partners. Sale documents prepared by Deutsche Bank revealed that the publisher's 2012 EBITDA was US$15 million. Forbes sought a price of US$400 million. In July 2014, the Forbes family bought out Elevation and sold a 51 per cent majority of the company to Integrated Whale Media Investments. Apart from Forbes and its lifestyle supplement, Forbes Life, other titles include Forbes Asia and fifteen local language editions.
Steve Forbes and his magazine's writers offer investment advice on the weekly Fox TV show Forbes on Fox and on Forbes on Radio. Other company groups include Forbes Conference Group, Forbes Investment Advisory Group and Forbes Custom Media. From the 2009 Times report: "Steve Forbes returned from opening up a Forbes magazine in India, bringing the number of foreign editions to 10." In addition, that year the company began publishing ForbesWoman, a quarterly magazine published by Steve Forbes's daughter, Moira Forbes, with a companion Web site. The company published American Legacy magazine as a joint venture, although that magazine separated from Forbes on May 14, 2007; the company formerly published American Heritage and Invention & Technology magazines. After failing to find a buyer, Forbes suspended publication of these two magazines as of May 17, 2007. Both magazines were purchased by the American Heritage Publishing Company and resumed publication as of the spring of 2008. Forbes has published the Forbes Travel Guide since 2009.
On January 6, 2014, Forbes magazine announced that, in partnership with app creator Maz, it was launching a social networking app called "Stream". Stream allows Forbes readers to save and share visual content with other readers and discover content from Forbes magazine and Forbes.com within the app. Forbes.com is part of Forbes Digital, a division of Forbes Media LLC. Forbes's holdings include a portion of RealClearPolitics. Together these sites reach more than 27 million unique visitors each month. Forbes.com employs the slogan "Home Page for the World's Business Leaders" and claimed, in 2006, to be the world's most visited business web site. The 2009 Times report said that, while "one of the top five financial sites by traffic off an estimated $70 million to $80 million a year in revenue, never yielded the hoped-for public offering". Forbes.com uses a "contributor model" in which a wide network of "contributors" writes and publishes articles directly on the website. Contributors are paid based on traffic to their respective Forbes.com pages.
Forbes allows advertisers to publish blog posts on its website alongside regular editorial content through a program called BrandVoice, which accounts for more than 10 pe
Digital rights management
Digital rights management tools or technological protection measures are a set of access control technologies for restricting the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies try to control the use and distribution of copyrighted works, as well as systems within devices that enforce these policies; the use of digital rights management is not universally accepted. Proponents of DRM argue that it is necessary to prevent intellectual property from being copied just as physical locks are needed to prevent personal property from being stolen, that it can help the copyright holder maintain artistic control, that it can ensure continued revenue streams; those opposed to DRM contend there is no evidence that DRM helps prevent copyright infringement, arguing instead that it serves only to inconvenience legitimate customers, that DRM helps big business stifle innovation and competition. Furthermore, works can become permanently inaccessible if the DRM scheme changes or if the service is discontinued.
DRM can restrict users from exercising their legal rights under the copyright law, such as backing up copies of CDs or DVDs, lending materials out through a library, accessing works in the public domain, or using copyrighted materials for research and education under the fair use doctrine. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Software Foundation consider the use of DRM systems to be an anti-competitive practice. Worldwide, many laws have been created which criminalize the circumvention of DRM, communication about such circumvention, the creation and distribution of tools used for such circumvention; such laws are part of the United States' Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the European Union's Copyright Directive. The rise of digital media and analog-to-digital conversion technologies has vastly increased the concerns of copyright-owning individuals and organizations within the music and movie industries. While analog media lost quality with each copy generation, in some cases during normal use, digital media files may be duplicated an unlimited number of times with no degradation in the quality.
The rise of personal computers as household appliances has made it convenient for consumers to convert media in a physical, analog or broadcast form into a universal, digital form for portability or viewing later. This, combined with the Internet and popular file-sharing tools, has made unauthorized distribution of copies of copyrighted digital media much easier. In 1983, a early implementation of Digital Rights Management was the Software Service System devised by the Japanese engineer Ryuichi Moriya. and subsequently refined under the name superdistribution. The SSS was based on encryption, with specialized hardware that controlled decryption and enabled payments to be sent to the copyright holder; the underlying principle of the SSS and subsequently of superdistribution was that the distribution of encrypted digital products should be unrestricted and that users of those products would not just be permitted to redistribute them but would be encouraged to do so. Common DRM techniques include restrictive licensing agreements: The access to digital materials and public domain is restricted to consumers as a condition of entering a website or when downloading software.
Encryption, scrambling of expressive material and embedding of a tag, designed to control access and reproduction of information, including backup copies for personal use. DRM technologies enable content publishers to enforce their own access policies on content, such as restrictions on copying or viewing; these technologies have been criticized for restricting individuals from copying or using the content such as by fair use. DRM is in common use by the entertainment industry. Many online music stores, such as Apple's iTunes Store, e-book publishers and vendors, such as OverDrive use DRM, as do cable and satellite service operators, to prevent unauthorized use of content or services. However, Apple dropped DRM from all iTunes music files around 2009. Industry has expanded the usage of DRM to more traditional hardware products, such as Keurig's coffeemakers, Philips' light bulbs, mobile device power chargers, John Deere's tractors. For instance, tractor companies try to prevent farmers from making DIY repairs under usage of DRM-laws as DMCA.
Computer games sometimes use DRM technologies to limit the number of systems the game can be installed on by requiring authentication with an online server. Most games with this restriction allow three or five installs, although some allow an installation to be'recovered' when the game is uninstalled; this not only limits users who have more than three or five computers in their homes, but can prove to be a problem if the user has to unexpectedly perform certain tasks like upgrading operating systems or reformatting the computer's hard drive, tasks which, depending on how the DRM is implemented, count a game's subsequent reinstall as a new installation, making the game unusable after a certain period if it is only used on a single computer. In mid-2008, the Windows version of Mass Effect marked the start of a wave of titles making use of SecuROM for DRM and requiring authentication with a server; the use of t
OCLC
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Incorporated d/b/a OCLC is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs". It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded by the fees that libraries have to pay for its services. OCLC maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system. OCLC began in 1967, as the Ohio College Library Center, through a collaboration of university presidents, vice presidents, library directors who wanted to create a cooperative computerized network for libraries in the state of Ohio; the group first met on July 5, 1967 on the campus of the Ohio State University to sign the articles of incorporation for the nonprofit organization, hired Frederick G. Kilgour, a former Yale University medical school librarian, to design the shared cataloging system.
Kilgour wished to merge the latest information storage and retrieval system of the time, the computer, with the oldest, the library. The plan was to merge the catalogs of Ohio libraries electronically through a computer network and database to streamline operations, control costs, increase efficiency in library management, bringing libraries together to cooperatively keep track of the world's information in order to best serve researchers and scholars; the first library to do online cataloging through OCLC was the Alden Library at Ohio University on August 26, 1971. This was the first online cataloging by any library worldwide. Membership in OCLC is based on use of services and contribution of data. Between 1967 and 1977, OCLC membership was limited to institutions in Ohio, but in 1978, a new governance structure was established that allowed institutions from other states to join. In 2002, the governance structure was again modified to accommodate participation from outside the United States.
As OCLC expanded services in the United States outside Ohio, it relied on establishing strategic partnerships with "networks", organizations that provided training and marketing services. By 2008, there were 15 independent United States regional service providers. OCLC networks played a key role in OCLC governance, with networks electing delegates to serve on the OCLC Members Council. During 2008, OCLC commissioned two studies to look at distribution channels. In early 2009, OCLC negotiated new contracts with the former networks and opened a centralized support center. OCLC provides bibliographic and full-text information to anyone. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the largest online public access catalog in the world. WorldCat has holding records from private libraries worldwide; the Open WorldCat program, launched in late 2003, exposed a subset of WorldCat records to Web users via popular Internet search and bookselling sites.
In October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record. WikiD was phased out; the Online Computer Library Center acquired the trademark and copyrights associated with the Dewey Decimal Classification System when it bought Forest Press in 1988. A browser for books with their Dewey Decimal Classifications was available until July 2013; until August 2009, when it was sold to Backstage Library Works, OCLC owned a preservation microfilm and digitization operation called the OCLC Preservation Service Center, with its principal office in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The reference management service QuestionPoint provides libraries with tools to communicate with users; this around-the-clock reference service is provided by a cooperative of participating global libraries. Starting in 1971, OCLC produced catalog cards for members alongside its shared online catalog. OCLC commercially sells software, such as CONTENTdm for managing digital collections.
It offers the bibliographic discovery system WorldCat Discovery, which allows for library patrons to use a single search interface to access an institution's catalog, database subscriptions and more. OCLC has been conducting research for the library community for more than 30 years. In accordance with its mission, OCLC makes its research outcomes known through various publications; these publications, including journal articles, reports and presentations, are available through the organization's website. OCLC Publications – Research articles from various journals including Code4Lib Journal, OCLC Research, Reference & User Services Quarterly, College & Research Libraries News, Art Libraries Journal, National Education Association Newsletter; the most recent publications are displayed first, all archived resources, starting in 1970, are available. Membership Reports – A number of significant reports on topics ranging from virtual reference in libraries to perceptions about library funding. Newsletters – Current and archived newsletters for the library and archive community.
Presentations – Presentations from both guest speakers and OCLC research from conferences and other events. The presentations are organized into five categories: Conference presentations, Dewey presentations, Distinguished Seminar Series, Guest presentations, Research staff
