Polk County Public Library Director Mark Pumphrey was elected to the OCLC Global Council at the June 25 meeting of the OCLC Americas Region Council in Washington, D.C. The Americas Region encompasses all of North and South America. &bsp;

OCLC is a worldwide library network developed in the 1960s to aid and enhance all member libraries, and to provide training, cataloging support, interlibrary loan support, and other forms of resource sharing among libraries of all types around the globe. Its catalog, WorldCat, is the largest single library catalog in the world, and is the critical element in much of the resource sharing among libraries that is provided by OCLC.

Each regional council represents member libraries throughout the region on issues regarding OCLC. Regions elect delegates to the global council at their membership meetings, to serve two year terms on the global council.

At meetings preceding each American Library Association conference, and at an annual meeting held in Dublin, Ohio, the home of OCLC, global council delegates meet to deliberate on issues of concern to OCLC members libraries and then to make recommendations to the OCLC executive board based on concerns identified.

In his role as a global council delegate from the OCLC Americas Regional Council, Pumphreys role will be to represent the interests and voice the concerns of all member libraries in North and South America at meetings of the global council.&bsp; He will also be charged with responsibility to see that his communications on behalf of libraries from the Americas region are in turn communicated to the members of the OCLC executive board.

Delegates to the OCLC global council are nominated to assure equal representation on the council of libraries of all types and sizes, and from all corners of the world. Only two public library directors were added to the global council in the recent election from the Americas region: one representing a large, urban library in Canada; and Pumphrey, who will represent the interests and concerns of small and rural libraries from throughout the Americas.