Fred Kilgour - Biography

Biography

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts to Edward Francis and Lillian Piper Kilgour, Kilgour earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Harvard College in 1935 and afterward held the position as assistant to the director of Harvard University Library.

In 1940, he married Eleanor Margaret Beach, who had graduated from Mount Holyoke College and taken a job at the Harvard College Library, where they met.

In 1942 to 1945, Kilgour served during World War II as a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve and was Executive Secretary and Acting Chairman of the U.S. government’s Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC), which developed a system for obtaining publications from enemy and enemy-occupied areas. This organization of 150 persons in outposts around the world microfilmed newspapers and other printed information items and sent them back to Washington, DC.

An example of the kind of intelligence gathered was the Japanese “News for Sailors” reports that listed new minefields. These reports were sent from Washington, D.C. directly to Pearl Harbor and U.S. submarines in the Western Pacific. Kilgour received the Legion of Merit for his intelligence work in 1945. He worked at the United States Department of State as deputy director of the Office of Intelligence Collection and Dissemination from 1946-48.

In 1948, he was named Librarian of the Yale Medical Library. At Yale he was also a lecturer in the history of science and technology and published many scholarly articles on those topics. While running the Yale University Medical Library, Kilgour began publishing studies and articles on library use and effectiveness. He asked his staff to collect empirical data, such as use of books and journals by categories of borrowers to guide selection and retention of titles. He viewed the library “not merely as a depository of knowledge,” but as “an instrument of education.”

At the dawn of library automation in the early 1970s, he joined the Ohio College Association in 1967 to develop OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and led the creation of a library network that today links 72,000 institutions in 170 countries. It first amassed the catalogs of 54 academic libraries in Ohio, launching in 1971 and expanding to non-Ohio libraries in 1977.

Kilgour was president of OCLC from 1967 to 1980, presiding over its rapid growth from an intrastate network to an international network. In addition to creating the WorldCat database, he developed an online interlibrary loan system that last year libraries used to arrange nearly 10 million loans.

Today, OCLC has a staff of 1,200 and offices in seven countries. Its mission remains the same: to further access to the world’s information and reduce library costs. In 1981 Kilgour stepped down from management but continued to serve on the OCLC Board of Trustees until 1995.

He was a distinguished research professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He taught there from 1990, retiring in 2004.

He died in 2006 was 92 years old and had lived since 1990 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He was survived by his wife and their daughters, Martha Kilgour and Alison Kilgour of New York City, and Meredith Kilgour Perdiew of North Edison, New Jersey; and two grandchildren and five great grandchildren.