For almost 35 years OCLC has served the library community, to the best of its ability, and in accordance with our charter to ”…. further ease of access to and use of the ever-expanding body of scientific, literary and educational knowledge and information.”

Our vision is to be the leading global library cooperative, helping libraries serve people by providing economical access to knowledge through innovation and collaboration.

The traditional OCLC services such as cataloguing and resource sharing (ILL) have their foundations firmly placed in WorldCAT, the unrivalled bibliographic database containing almost 50 million records.

As we respond to the demands of the end-user communities we continue to add both content and enhanced functionality to the FirstSearch service, an online reference service providing access to unique content such as WorldCat, ArticleFirst, ProceedingsFirst and BioONE as well as the more widely available third party databases such as EconLit, Medline, etc.

Year 2002 has seen much activity within OCLC as we attempt to keep abreast of the ever-changing demands placed, both upon and by the library world. Such activities include the provision of newer services such as digitisation, archiving and the latest trend for virtual reference services.

The OCLC Europe office was established some 20 or so years ago with the primary objective to better serve our European community. However, while success is, in part proven by the extended membership to libraries in over 82 countries, we do not deny the all too often heard criticism that our products and services have a “U.S bias”. Furthermore, past pricing policies and models have been unsustainable by many libraries in the international library community.

As a direct consequence of these criticisms, OCLC recognised the need to offer a more appropriate marketing, sales and service provision to the European libraries. In this respect, we have redefined our objectives and direction with the formation of OCLC PICA – an organisation perfectly placed to provide products and services both designed and priced to meet each individual countries requirements, and more importantly, economic status. Our efforts have, are and continue to be supported by our regional partner ILIAC.

My paper hopes to give you a clear presentation of our current and future product and service offerings and our plans for closer cooperation with the European countries.