a portal. The IPL sections were:
Reference, Exhibits, Magazines and Serials, Newspapers, Online
Texts, and Web Searching. There were also Teen and Youth
sections. All items were carefully selected, catalogued and
described by the IPL staff. As an experimental library, IPL
also listed the best internet projects that were run by
librarians, in the section Especially for Librarians. Since
then, students from the IPL Consortium, a consortium of
colleges and universities with programs in information science,
have worked on maintaining and developing the IPL as a public
library for the web.

# Union catalogs

In 1999, the two main union catalogs were WorldCat, run by OCLC
(Online Computer Library Center), and RLIN (Research Library
Information Network), run by the Research Libraries Group
(RLG).

What exactly is a union catalog? The idea behind a union
catalog is to earn time by avoiding the cataloging of the same
document by many catalogers worldwide. When catalogers of a
member library catalog a new document, they first search the
union catalog. If the record is available, they import it into
their own library catalog and add the local data. If the record
is not available, they create it in their own library catalog
and export it into the union catalog. The new record is
immediately available to all catalogers of member libraries.
Depending on their status, experience and quality of
cataloging, member libraries can either import records only, or
import and export records.

OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) was created in 1971 as a
non-profit organization dedicated to furthering access to the
world's information while reducing information costs. The OCLC
Online Union Catalog - renamed WorldCat much later - began as
the union catalog of the university libraries in the State of
Ohio. Over the years, OCLC became a national and then worldwide
library cooperative, and WorldCat the largest library catalog
in the world. In early 1998, WorldCat had 38 million records in
400 languages - with transliteration for non-Roman languages) -
and an annual increase of 2 million records. In 1998, 27,000
libraries in 65 countries were using OCLC services (paid
subscription) to manage their collections and provide online
reference services.

WorldCat has only accepted one bibliographic record per
document, unlike RLIN (Research Library Information Network),
launched by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) in 1980. RLIN
accepted s