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

[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?