Hal is right. Over the last decade the WorldCat database has changed greatly in nature due to the batch loading of millions of records from non-member libraries. The 2009 OCLC annual report [1] has a chart on page 12 that shows that in 1998 Worldcat had 39 million records; in 2009 it had 139 million -- most of which came from batch loading. The 2012 report has a figure of 237 million records. That's about a 6x growth in less than 15 years. OCLC has 22.5K member libraries (which I read as being libraries that do their cataloging on OCLC), but over 74K "participating libraries." Another annual report gives the actual figure of member records v. non-member records, and member records are in the minority. [citation needed] The 2012 report gives good stats on numbers of records batch loaded, and it's quite impressive - hundreds of millions. As we saw with the list of subject heading terms that Roy produced (which I don't have a link to, sorry), many of the terms ("geschichte" was a notable one) come from data that is from outside of the AngloAmerican world. That said, the OCLC WorldCat database is a good measure of the bibliographic universe beyond AACR and MARC, although the "MARC-ification" of the data may mask some of the qualities of the original data. I highly recommend looking at the annual reports for good data about OCLC's growth and contents. There are stats on record numbers by language, etc. kc [1] annual reports are listed on this page: https://www.oclc.org/en-CA/about/sustainability.html On 3/8/13 9:20 PM, Hal Cain wrote: > On Fri, 8 Mar 2013 16:12:48 -0500, Simon Spero <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > >> Field 245 shows some other curiosities: >> http://experimental.worldcat.org/marcusage/245.html >> >> Subfield 245 $k has 469,891 occurrences, but only 427,311 holdings; this >> suggests that there are records included in the counts which have zero >> holdings. These might be worth filtering out. > Something else that probably has little impact on the totals for the whole > database, but which should be taken into account if investigation is > segmented by publication date: my experience suggests that there is a > sizeable number of duplicate records for pre-AACR cataloguing (that is, more > or less, pre-1970 publications -- and I would say the period till 1980 and > the onset of AACR2 also includes more duplicates than later. I ascribe this > to far less uniformity in cataloguing practice before AACR, and many such > records having been converted retrospectively with little review, and loaded > in bulk. In addition, many foreign records, and British Library files, and > the like, totally non-AACR/AACR2 and without any subject access, have been > loaded in recent years. The WorldCat database is quite a mixture; beware of > relying too heavily on any simple tabulations. > > Hal Cain > Melbourne, Australia > [log in to unmask] -- Karen Coyle [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet