And the brilliance of Kilgour’s enterprise was that if the cataloguer did not find a record, she could undertake to describe the book herself, and contribute her work to the system as a “master record” for that book, for the good of all members. She wrote a sort of poem, following a set of rules more rigorous than a villanelle’s; she sent it off to people in Ohio who published it for her; and then she got paid a few dollars—in the form of a cataloguing credit against fixture O.C.L.C. charges. The more fresh “copy” a cataloguing department offered O.C.L.C., the cheaper its use of O.C.L.C. was, and thus there was plenty of incentive for all libraries, engaged in the creation of a kind of virtual community long before there were such things as the Internet, to pump up the burgeoning database. What began mainly as a handy, unilateral way of delivering the Library of Congress MARC files to member libraries turned into a highly democratic, omnidirectional collaboration among hundreds of thousands of once isolated documentalists: currently, there are close to thirty million records in the database, only a quarter of which originally came from the Library of Congress, the majority being the work of seven thousand member libraries.