Collection overlap between public library collections in the United States and Canada is examined from both the general user's and the bibliographer's viewpoint. Random samples of monographs published since 1970 were taken from eight public libraries and searched in the OCLC data base. The consistently high find rate on OCLC and the large percentage of Library of Congress MARC cataloging are discussed.

The Library Computer System (LCS) computer network in Illinois contains machine-readable records representing the collections of each of the member academic libraries. Twenty-one of the twenty-two libraries in the LCS network as of 1983 agreed to participate in a study of collection overlap. A random sample representing about 1 percent of each collection was drawn. A procedure was devised to match and merge records that represented the same title; it proved to be more than 97 percent accurate. The significant findings were that a high percentage of titles, 69.46 percent, occurred only once in the network and that a percentage of the collection of each library, ranging from 6.1 percent to 68.4 percent, was unique to that library.

Cooperative Cataloging and Automated Bibliographic Networks; Considerations for Public Libraries

Citations

Collection overlap in the LCS network in Illinois

Collection overlap in the lcs network

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