OCLC was founded in 1967 under the leadership of Fred Kilgour.

[7] That same year, OCLC began to develop the union

catalog technology that would later evolve into WorldCat; the first catalog records were added in 1971.[7][8]
In 2003, OCLC began the "Open WorldCat" pilot program, making abbreviated records from a subset of WorldCat
available to partner web sites and booksellers, to increase the accessibility of its subscribing member libraries'
collections.[9][10]
In October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and
structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record.[11] WikiD was later phased out, although WorldCat later
incorporated user-generated content in other ways.[12][13]
In 2006, it became possible for anyone to search WorldCat directly at its open website,[14] not only through the
subscription FirstSearch interface where it had been available on the web to subscribing libraries for more than a
decade before.[15] Options for more sophisticated searches of WorldCat have remained available through the FirstSearch
interface.[14]
In 2007, WorldCat Identities began providing pages for 20 million "identities", which are metadata about names—
predominantly authors and persons who are the subjects of published titles.[16]
In 2017, OCLC's WorldCat Search API was integrated into the cite tool of Wikipedia's VisualEditor, allowing Wikipedia
editors to cite sources from WorldCat easily.[17][18]
As of May 2019, WorldCat contained over 450 million bibliographic records in 484 languages, representing over 2.8
billion physical and digital library assets,[5] and the WorldCat persons dataset (mined from WorldCat) included over 100
million people.[19]