Tables of Contents in Library Catalogs: A Quantitative Examination of Analytic Catalogs

Abstract

Easy access to tables of contents from vendors and the technological development of optical character reading have actualized access to articles in books via tables of contents in library catalogs. From earlier studies we know that analytic book catalogs can provide access to up to 600% more works than the traditional catalog by simply adding analytics for works in composite works to the catalog, In this study we examine the proportion of composite works and the number of articles in these books in two different university libraries. The influences of library type, publication language, subject field, and date of publication are examined, and the results are compared to previous studies. The proportion of composite works is between 10% and 20%. The number of articles in the composite works varies from 20 to 30 articles per book—highest for the sciences and the English-language publications and lowest for the social sciences.