Unexpected statistic.

[elfs]

We had a department meeting at work yesterday, and obviously while I can't talk about any specific internal details, we did get a fascinating insight into how our product is being used by a spin-off project between various libraries and the Google Books people.

One of the things the manager of the project said, though, was that "Prior to 1965, the largest interlibrary catalogs in the world were tracking at less than 500,000 published works. Right new we estimate the number of published works that a world-spanning library catalog has to track at approximately 20 million."

That's a huge, huge jump. But really, less than half a million published works between the introduction of writing and 1965? That sounded really low to me.

Comments

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

That's not at all what your project manager said. The number of works in a catalog would be constrained by several factors:

1) Physical space available for the catalog.
2) Ability and willingness of libraries to send information about holdings to the interlibrary catalog. (My public library system currently has some books catalogued as Adult Fiction [meaning reading level, not erotica], rather than listing the title/author.] I would not be surprised to discover that this was more common with books the library suspected would have a short half-life in the 1960's.
3) Number of libraries in the catalog.
4) Ruthlesness about wheeding out extremely similar items: I would expect a decent catalog today to list varying editions and translations of the same material separately. In 1965, maybe not so much.
5) Duplication of material between libraries.

And that's just off the top of my head.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly.

Addendum to #1--even electronic catalogs used to take up a huge amount of space, and it all had to be accessible. No tape libraries here! As an example, in the early 90s I worked at Cornell U, where the library catalog ran on NOTIS. NOTIS ran on an IBM 3090 mainframe* somewhat prosaically named cornellc.

*For those of you too young to have ever met one, the central complex of a 3090 was rather...substantial. I know people who have *living rooms* smaller than cornellc. Water-cooled, and the machine room had its own *generator*. The UPS systems were to hold things long enough for the generator to power up, and the generator was to allow the mainframes to shut down gracefully. During the frequent summer power outages we'd all troop outside and listen to the generator fire up. It was only slightly less loud than a jet engine.

[bldrnrpdx.livejournal.com]

There's a variation of (4) - weeding out stuff that isn't circulating at optimum levels or is falling apart or is taken off the shelves for other reasons. I suspect that if you look at total number of titles over a year, my local library would list some large number N children's titles. But if you looked at the *current holdings* on any given day, the number would be N minus books not circulating, books lost/stolen, books mangled beyond library's willingness to circulate them, books moved to other libraries (for trade, replacement, or what-have-you), and books moved from the regular shelves to the Early Educator's program, where books are boxed & sent out to classrooms around town so the teachers have that many more books to use and share with the kids for a few months at a time.

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't mean wheeding out as in getting rid of items (although I understand that libraries need to do that, also.) More, wheeding out catalog entries for very similar items held at different libraries. For instance, most colleges' library system are going to have Shakespeare's plays and poems, but does the interlibrary catalog (particularly in 1965) need to list each and every edition of Hamlet held by its member libraries? They may choose not to list any standard edition, on the theory that everyone has one.

[bldrnrpdx.livejournal.com]

I know you hadn't meant that. That's why I mentioned it. :)

[reynai.livejournal.com]

Well, perhaps the key phrase there was 'were tracking' less than half a million. They existed, certainly, but how many of them were available via interlibrary loan? And, for that matter, at that time period, how much was available for international trading? In all, it makes me wonder if, perhaps, rather than there being that few works published, as much as that few works available to be loaned, and that few works thought to be important enough to loan.

How much would the 60s equivalent of Harlequin be traded about from library to library? How much were graphic novels, comics, and magazines traded about?

[phred1973.livejournal.com]

Methinks, 1) that card catalogs of 1965 are bound to be spotty, and

2) the computer has enabled MOAR people to hammer out MOAR pages, and until recently, lots of that became printed pages.

I can see pre-wordprocessor works being rather low, actually. Though I ultimately bow to your experience in far more extensive writing adventures.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Is this distinct from libraries such as the Library of Congress, which would be a better measure of US publishing?

A very cursory Google came up with more than 1 million volumes in 1900.