Robert L. Jordan (born 1943), known as Jay Jordan, is an American business executive who most recently served as president and executive officer of

OCLC OCLC, Inc., doing business as OCLC, See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It wa ...

, an international computer library network and conglomerate of databases and Web services. He served as president of OCLC from 1998 to his retirement in June 2013, and was succeeded in that position by Skip Prichard.

Biography

Jay Jordan earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from

Colgate University Colgate University is a private liberal arts college in Hamilton, New York. The college was founded in 1819 as the Baptist Education Society of the State of New York and operated under that name until 1823, when it was renamed Hamilton Theolog ...

. He served in the

US Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...

from March 1966 to March 1969, and was stationed in

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...

. He became a first lieutenant. After working for 3M in Europe and the United States, he joined Information Handling Services, where he worked for 24 years and was president of one of its divisions, IHS Engineering. In 1998, he became president and CEO of OCLC. Jordan was the fourth president of

, after Frederick G. Kilgour, Rowland C. W. Brown and K. Wayne Smith.

OCLC

At the time Jordan joined OCLC, the nonprofit organization represented around 8,300 member libraries. 14 years later technological developments had completely changed the information society and the use of libraries. During Jordan's term as president, OCLC tried to adapt to these new developments.

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

holdings grew during this period (to around 270 million bibliographic records), member libraries increased to around 22,500, and WorldCat.org was made available on the open web. At the same time OCLC developed new services (like QuestionPoint). OCLC made several acquisitions such as the

Research Libraries Group The Research Libraries Group (RLG) was a U.S.-based library consortium that existed from 1974 until its merger with the OCLC library consortium in 2006. RLG developed the Eureka interlibrary search engine, the RedLightGreen database of bibliogra ...

(2006), PICA (2007),

Ezproxy EZproxy is a web proxy server used by libraries to give access from outside the library's computer network to restricted-access websites that authenticate users by IP address. This allows library patrons at home or elsewhere to log in through ...

(2008) and

OAIster OAIster is an online combined bibliographic catalogue of open access material aggregated using OAI-PMH. It began at the University of Michigan in 2002 funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and with the purpose of establishing ...

(2009). OCLC sold NetLibrary in 2010.

VIAF The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). History Discussion about having a common ...

was implemented and hosted by OCLC. VIAF is a service to link identical records from different data sets together, thereby making it easier for patrons to find e.g. books from Dostoyevsky/Dostoïevski During Jordan's presidency OCLC also created a library advocacy program ("Geek the library"). It invested in new computer infrastructure, so it could handle non-Roman scripts. OCLC introduced new initiatives to make libraries and their paper and digital holdings more visible. CONTENTdm was set up to create better and stable online visibility for special collections and art treasures. In June 2012 Jay Jordan announced that he would postpone his retirement, which was planned for that year, and continue leading OCLC until June 2013. In May 2013 OCLC announced Skip Prichard to be the new CEO and President of OCLC as of July 2013.

References

External links

Interview with Jay Jordan by Thomas Hogan, ''Information Today'', June 2012
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jordan, Jay 1943 births Living people 3M people American computer businesspeople American technology chief executives Businesspeople in software Colgate University alumni Date of birth missing (living people) OCLC people People from Dublin, Ohio Place of birth missing (living people) United States Army officers