OCLC Top 50

OCLC recently released a file of 1.2 million metadata records for the most widely held items in its catalog. These are all items with 250 library holdings or more. I created a list on WorldCat of the top 50, mostly out of curiosity. I was quite surprised at the results, however.

Here's how it breaks down:

• 16 periodicals, with Time and Newsweek being numbers 1 and 2, respectively
• 29 kid and YA books, four of which (and very high even in this small list) from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series
• 5 adult books

The five adult books are:

1. McCullough, D. G. (1992). Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster. 
2. Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci code: A novel. New York: Doubleday.
3. Johnson, S. (1998). Who moved my cheese?: An a-mazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life. New York: Putnam. 
4. Haley, A. (1976). Roots. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.  
5. Peters, T. J., & Waterman, R. H. (1982). In search of excellence: Lessons from America's best-run companies. New York: Harper & Row

This small set gives me many ideas of things to investigate in the full set. First, the monographs in this set are all recent dates, with the oldest being 1976, and most after 2000.

I am hoping to graph the full set by date. What I expect is that the items will be overwhelmingly recent publications because libraries tend to hold what people read, and my guess is that readers are mainly reading new books. Also, libraries buy from the set of things that are in print, so even if they are buying a so-called classic (as they do every time yet another movie is made of Pride and Prejudice) they are buying a current edition which will have a recent date.

The next obvious bit of information would be correlation between holdings and date, which I expect to be high for the very reasons given above.

The overall distribution of holdings is unsurprising, starting high (at almost 7000 holdings), dropping off dramatically, and creating a long tail. (I had managed to coax a chart of out ooCalc but it crashed before I captured it. Am now studying how to deal with large files and visualization. Advice gladly received.) Of course, the tail would be very, very long if you could chart the entire WorldCat database. (Anyone know how many items in WC are held by only one library? I can't find that in the available WC stats.)

I think it would be interesting to be able to analyze library holdings in correlation with the FRBR-ization that OCLC has done. In fact, I would really like to see the top 1% (or .5%) of FRBR-ized items. Related to FRBR I am mainly wondering if we can estimate how frequently FRBR might fulfill its promise of saving the time of the cataloger. But that's for another day.