OCLC's Office of Research: Past, Present and Future

In the field of library and information science, the OCLC Online Computer Library Center's Office of Research and Special Projects (OCLC OR) is one of the premier research organizations. Unlike library and information science faculty, its staff can devote 100 percent of their time to research. Yet OCLC OR's contributions, especially its role in technological innovation, are not as well known to the profession as they ought to be. For instance, no analytical or historical articles have been previously published about OCLC OR's work in the open literature. ¹ Therefore, a historico-critical study of OCLC OR's development, present status and activities, and likely future direction would be an important contribution to advancing knowledge of its contributions. Such an examination is timely inasmuch as OCLC celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1997. Hence, the purpose of this article is: (1) to describe the historical development of the Office within its institutional context; (2) to examine its present status, especially its current projects; and (3) to predict its likely future path. One might ask three key, guiding questions about OCLC's OR: Can they look to the past with pride? If one takes sober stock of the present, what would one find? And looking to the future, should one be optimistic? In fact, these are the questions that I propose to answer in this article because of their heuristic value to this investigation.