The way our particular library system is organized, it's "simple" to
find out how many bibliographic records contain a given series, and
also know whether there's an authority record for it. In my own
database, I find 110,612 different established series headings with
attached bibliographic records. Not surprisingly, a large number of
established bibliographic series appear in only one record: 42%,
rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent; 16% of series appear in
two bibliographic records, 9% in three records, and so on in a
nicely-tapering fashion (somewhat masked by rounding), the first part
of which I'll include here:
1 occurrence 42%
2 occurrences 16%
3 occurrences 9%
4 occurrences 6%
5 occurrences 4.1%
6 occurrences 3%
7 occurrences 2.4%
8 occurrences 2%
9 occurrences 1.6%
10 occurrences 1.4%
11 occurrences 1.1%
12 occurrences 0.9%
13 occurrences 0.8%
14 occurrences 0.8%
15 occurrences 0.6%
16 occurrences 0.6%
17 occurrences 0.5%
18 occurrences 0.4%
19 occurrences 0.4%
20 occurrences 0.4%
At the high end of the scale, I find that 3.7% of traced established
series occur in more than 30 bibliographic records.
We also have 24,874 distinct bibliographic traced series headings
that don't match authority records. The distribution of these is
even more extreme: 80.1% of these occur in only one bibliographic
record, and 0.4% occur in more than 30 bibliographic records.
Gary L. Strawn, Authorities Librarian, etc.
Northwestern University, 1970 Campus Drive, Evanston IL 60208-2300
e-mail: [log in to unmask] voice: 847/491-2788 fax: 847/491-8306
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
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