bers and participate in the election of the Board of Trustees; the
Ohio College Library Center became OCLC, Inc. In 1981, the legal name
of the corporation became OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
Today, OCLC serves more than 27,000 libraries of all types in the US
and 64 other countries and territories." (excerpt from the 1998
website)

In early 1998, WorldCat had 38 million records - with one record per
document. RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network) had 88 million
records - with several records per document.

RLIN was run by the Research Libraries Group (RLG). The central RLIN
database was a union catalog of 88 million items held in main libraries
belonging to RLG member institutions, including research and
specialized libraries, like law, technical, and corporate libraries.

RLIN included:

(1) records that described works cataloged by the Library of Congress,
the National Library of Medicine, the US Government Printing Office,
CONSER (Conversion of Serials Project), the British Library, the
British National Bibliography, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript
Collections, and RLG members and users;

(2) nearly all the books cataloged since 1968 and rapidly expanding
coverage for older materials;

(3) information about non-book materials ranging from musical scores,
films, videos, serials, maps, and recordings, to archival collections
and machine-readable data files;

(4) unique on-line access to special resources, such as the United
Nations' DOCFILE and CATFILE records, and the Rigler and Deutsch Index
to pre-1950 commercial sound recordings;

(5) international book vendors' in-process records, that were
transferred to bibliographers, acquisition services and catalogers, to
order records or help them for cataloguing items in their own local
databases.

RLIN also provided:

(1) A catalog of computer files. Machine-readable data files were
useful to a growing number of disciplines. RLIN contained records
describing a number of such files, from the full-text French literary
works in the ARTFL Database to the statistical data collected by the
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
at the University of Michigan;

(2) A catalog of archives and special collections. The archival and
manuscript collections of research libraries, museums, state archives,
and historical societies contained essential primary resources, but
information about their contents was ofte