Libcitations, worldcat, cultural impact, and fame

Abstract

Just as citations to a book can be counted, so can that book's libcitations—the number of libraries in a consortium that hold it. These holdings counts per title can be obtained from the consortium's union catalog, such as OCLC's WorldCat. Librarians seeking to serve their customers well must be attuned to various kinds of merit in books. The result in WorldCat is a great variation in the libcitations particular books receive. The higher a title's count (or percentile), the more famous it is—either absolutely or within a subject class. Degree of fame also indicates cultural impact, allowing that further documentation of impact may be needed. Using WorldCat data, we illustrate high, medium, and low degrees of fame with 170 titles published during 1990–1995 or 2001–2006 and spanning the 10 main Dewey classes. We use their total libcitation counts or their counts from members of the Association of Research Libraries, or both, as of late 2011. Our analysis of their fame draws on the recognizability of their authors, the extent to which they and their authors are covered by Wikipedia, and whether they have movie or TV versions. Ordinal scales based on Wikipedia coverage and on libcitation counts are very significantly associated.