Béla Hatvany
American library pioneer
Béla Hatvany is a pioneer in the automation of libraries and the information industry. Companies founded by him have been responsible for the first Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), the first CD-ROMs, the first networked CD-ROM, the first client-server library databases, and some of the earliest internet library database retrieval engines. In addition, he was a key investor in the first streaming music databases for libraries (Classical.com), and online ready references for libraries (Credo Reference). He is recognized as a visionary in library information.
Biography
Béla Hatvany was born in 1938 in London a few weeks after his parents arrived as immigrants. His father was a Hungarian Jew and a Baron, his mother from Spanish nobility. Béla spent his childhood in England. He received a scholarship to attend University of St Andrews from BP. In 1956 he began his career as a customer service engineer, a computer programmer and a salesman.
In 1965, he moved to the United States to get an MBA at Harvard University. He founded his first company, COMSISA, in Mexico City, in 1968 which computerised and served sugar mills and local businesses.
“Béla Hatvany” enters the record as american library pioneer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Béla, Hatvany and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5005013. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938, 1956, 1965 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Béla Hatvany” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.