Books as Expressions of Global Cultural Diversity

Abstract

A number of bodies have been jointly interested in book publication data as measures of cultural diversity. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics is especially interested in global patterns in book publication as expressions of cultural diversity and heritage. Such data, however, are not widely collected by national publishing organizations and library statistics agencies. The increasingly global reach of the WorldCat database, on the other hand, makes it an obvious source for data mining. This paper presents results from an OCLC Research project that produced a rich data portrait of global book publishing, with emphasis on collection analysis by country. Researchers were able to compare the annual publishing for every country of the world (as reflected in WorldCat), the libraries that collect and import a country's works, the monographs their libraries import from other countries, and the proportion of publications in various official and native languages. The results provide a global overview of book publishing and a wealth of case studies in single countries’ practices in book publishing and the preservation of their literary heritage. The present paper compares the book publishing and book collections in libraries in six countries around the world and demonstrates the power of data mining within this sphere
.