Pre-1980: 15,222,793
1980-2004: 13,210,095
Basically, the number of titles for all books before 1980 is only barely greater than the number of titles in the 24 years since 1980.
Figure 4 shows numbers of holdings in the entire OCLC catalog:
Pre-1980: 330,291,378ARL libraries aren't as top-heavy in the 1980-2004 level as are other OCLC libraries, which makes sense. But what this does tell me is that libraries are facing a huge increase in volumes that they must manage, and it must be because there is a lot more being published. Wikipedia reports these figures for the number of titles published per year in the UK and US. Presumably this is book titles only:
1980-2004: 388,721,240
Note the near doubling in the UK, and near trebling in the US. This may not be news, but I have never before seen figures that confirmed my general feeling that it's all speeding up.
- United Kingdom (1996) 107,263 [2] (2005) 206,000, [3]
- United States (1996) 68,175 [5] (2005) 172,000, [3]
1 comment:
Check out for some relevent data:
Lavoie, Brian F. 2006. "Books without Boundaries: A Brief Tour of the System-wide Print Book Collection." With Roger C. Schonfeld. Journal of Electronic Publishing, 9,2 (Summer). Available online at: http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0009.208
Lavoie, Brian, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Lorcan Dempsey. 2005. "Anatomy of Aggregate Collections: The Example of Google Print for Libraries." D-Lib Magazine, 11,9 (September). Available online at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/lavoie/09lavoie.html. Reprinted in Zeitschrift fur Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie, 52,6 (2005): 299-310.
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