# /research/projects/globalbooks/default.htm

originally: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/globalbooks/default.htm

# Books as Expressions of Global Cultural Diversity
A Data Mining Research Project

## Overview

Data from the global bibliographic database WorldCat reveal transnational patterns in literary publishing, the preservation of individual countries’ literary heritage, and the cultural diversity present in the books.

## Background

Globally and nationally, books represent a central kind of cultural heritage. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics has been exploring library statistics for worldwide book consumption, and helped to found the European Expert Meeting on Book and Library Statistics. These bodies, as well as the International Federation of Library Associations, are especially interested in any global patterns in the book world as expressions of cultural diversity and heritage.

Such data, however, are not widely collected by any national publishing organizations or library statistics agencies. UNESCO maintains a database (http://www.unesco.org/culture/xtrans) of translated works worldwide, but is unable on its own to access worldwide monographic statistics.

The increasingly global reach of the WorldCatTM database, on the other hand, makes it an obvious source to mine such data. OCLC’s bibliographic database represents more than 127 million items, with 1.3 billion copies held by libraries worldwide. OCLC researchers have already produced a prototype application which graphically displays worldwide patterns in bibliographic holdings (http://worldmap.oclc.org).

## Goals

The current project will produce a rich data portrait of the global literary arts (as reflected in the WorldCat database), with emphasis on cultural literary heritage by country and region. Researchers will be able to compare the overall annual publishing for every country of the world, the libraries that collect and even import a country’s works, the “foreign” monographs their libraries import, and the proportion of publications in various official and native languages.

## Outcomes

The output will include a large set of statistics compared by country and an accompanying report of findings. These results will provide a global overview of the transnational literary arts, and a wealth of case studies in single countries’ practices in both literary publishing and the preservation of their literary heritage.

## Relationship to Other OCLC Research Activities

This effort is one of several data mining projects whereby OCLC Research seeks to extract intelligence from the data we have, and use it in different ways that provide value to libraries.

## Duration

- January 2009-November 2009

## Team members

- Timothy J. Dickey, lead
- Lynn Silipigni Connaway
- Karen Smith-Yoshimura
- Jeremy Browning