From the article it seems that OCLC started out as this idealized possibility of connecting all library catalogs together so that library users could truly be patrons of "THE LIBRARY" rather then patrons of a library but it got corrupted along the way by practicality and reality. The expense of getting all of the libraries to buy into a system required funding that was gained when they sold MARC records to libraries causing some libraries to not be able to join because they couldn't afford the membership fees.
An interesting point in the article was that Andrew Carnegie was the driving force behind the creation of Doctoral Studies in Library Science not just building wonderful libraries.
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