OCLC has a new logo

Let me just say for starters, congratulations OCLC on your 40th birthday. It's probably a good time to put out a new corporate logo. The concept (news release) has a nice, trinitarian feel to it, not exactly Father, Son and Holy Ghost, but close.

Connecting libraries at the local, group and global levels
Connecting people through libraries to knowledge
Connecting past, present, and future through access to library collections

Saying things in threes is just so . . . rhythmic. "OCLC. The world's libraries. Connected." "Enhance processes. Extend collections and access. Strengthen your users’ experience." "Establish, maintain and operate a computerized library network." "The evolution of library use, of libraries themselves and of librarianship."

This knowledge thing is inaccurate, however. "Information" is not "knowledge," and that's what giant corporations like OCLC have--it harvests, stores, compacts, reconfigures and distributes information, not knowledge. You wouldn't say wheat is bread, or sugar is candy. Don't say information is knowledge. Nor is it necessarily power. Of the top 15 management posts at OCLC, 4 are held by librarians, who should be the most powerful people in the world if that old saw were true.

I think I know what a local level is and possibly what a global level is. However, level is one of those squishy overused English words that is forced to work overtime at low pay--tool, device, line, measurement, equal, balanced, surface, magnitude, calm, proportional, governmental body--so you almost can't go wrong by using it.

When I arrived in Columbus 40 years ago to catalog Russian books at The Ohio State University Libraries (I also had to type the cards on a manual cyrillic typewriter), the Ohio College Library Consortium (54 libraries) had 3 employees, one of whom was the founder and visionary, Fred Kilgour, and was located on the 3rd floor of Thompson Library. I used to go to lunch with one of them whose name I've forgotten, because we were both new in town and didn't know anyone. Then it moved over to Kinnear Road for awhile, eventually changing "Ohio" to "On-line," and "College" to "Computer," and then to Dublin, Ohio, changing its legal name to an acronym, serving 60,000 libraries in 112 countries.