I met Fred Kilgour only once. This was earlier this year In Chapel Hill when I had lunch with Fred and his wife Eleanor. We talked about the past, but what most occupied Fred and Eleanor was what they were doing then and what they were going to do. There are very few people in our profession who combine the intellectual capacity to imagine how things might be very different, the entrepreneurial ability to create real structural change, and the organizational skills to sustain that change through new institutions. Fred Kilgour managed that and very much more in a long and rewarding life. May he rest in peace.
Frederick G. Kilgour, a librarian and educator who created an international computer library network and database that changed the way people use libraries, died on July 31, 2006. He was 92 years old and had lived since 1990 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. [Frederick G. Kilgour, Creator of an International Computer Library [OCLC]]
