The British Columbia Union Catalogue (BCUC) was a province-wide bibliographic database of library collections representing both post-secondary and public libraries. First proposed in a series of reports in the early 1970s, it was established in 1977 and funded by the B.C. Ministry of Education. Participating libraries entered their catalogue records into a machine-readable database to generate local catalogues and produce a single union catalogue of all their collections. It was then distributed throughout the province so that users could locate materials anywhere in the province and obtain them through interlibrary loans. BCUC initially included the library collections at UBC, SFU, and UVic and then expanded to local college libraries. Richmond Public Library was the first public library to join the network in 1978. Unfortunately, provincial funding was discontinued in 1983 before the project was completed.