Top Thousand: Techie Readers Can Look Elsewhere

[beamjockey]

Ed Felten just pointed out the OCLC's thousand books most frequently appearing on library shelves. He was disappointed (and so am I) to find very little science and technology among these volumes.

Comments

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

As I've pointed out several times in various places, OCLC demographics are heavily skewed to public libraries who have a different mission and focus than school or academic libraries.

MKK

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I saw this mentioned on Mark Evanier's site. He was curious about books by living authors and dug until he found one. It was a Garfield collection.

Yes, I weep for mankind.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

It's not that remarkable, I'd guess. Any check like this counts the peak incidences of a single book not the actual breadth of books covered, so you're going to be artificially inflating the proportion of fiction - where a lot of libraries will have a hundred or two books in common, so the number-of-incidences for that book goes up. (If you have any classic fiction, you probably have X, Y, Z Dickens novels, or Huck Finn, for example, because they're standards, they're cheap, you feel a little silly not having them...).
On the other side, there are a lot of sci/tech books, there's a limited amount of duplication. New science books are expensive (god knows it limits my own buying), so people don't always get them in; there'll be - say - some math books, sure, but how many math books have been written in the past few decades? It's a huge number for them to be drawn from, and the absence of any centralised stocking (or general user pressures for this particular title to be purchased, something much more likely to happen in fiction) means that they're almost certainly going to be a heterogenous bunch.

I'm not sure if I expressed that very well...

The reductio ad absurdum would be, hmm. A thousand libraries, each with ten fiction books from a list of a thousand standards, and a hundred books from a pool of about twenty thousand non-fiction works. You'd end up with those thousand novels all filling your "Top 1000" list, with ten incidences each, but the ten times greater number of non-fiction books (with about five incidences each) wouldn't show up, if that makes sense.

Now, I've no experience of the US public library system, but whilst it may well be in a position to benefit from more sci/tech holdings - this is a metric that, to me, is very likely to underestimate the amount of them in libraries.

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

How often do even you sit down for an evening with, say, a copy of the CRC?

Science books tend to be reference books, that you pick up once in a while to consult, and put back on the shelf. You are not likely to check them out - even if you could.

I was struck by the number of those books that are A) aimed at toddlers (e.g. Mother Goose); and B) books I had to read for one English course or another. Why buy a copy of "The Tempest" when you can borrow one from the library?

I think this says more about what we're assigned in English class than anything else.