OCLC as a guide to book value - usefulness and limitations
Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 1:17 am
Have you ever seen a book listed by a bookseller in which the bookseller remarks 'Only x copies in OCLC' to justify a very high price?
After noticing this a number of times, I naturally found myself asking myself 'What is OCLC and how do I access it?'
What I have discovered so far is that OCLC appears to be a co-operatively run international organisation of participating libraries whose holdings are catalogued within a unified database of books that is freely accessible over the Internet by anyone at all. Thus the idea is that anyone wanting to know where to find a rare or scholarly book to research can simply select the relevant author, title and edition date in OCLC and see a list of all holdings of that book in a particular country.
Since there are many hundreds of libraries, especially in North America and the UK, but also throughout Western Europe, that are members of OCLC, its database serves as a very useful sample of the holdings of libraries across these parts of the world, and thus as a rough indicator of the prevalence of particular books in libraries within North America and Western Europe.
There are a few limitations however:
First and foremost, not all the best libraries are members, or if they are, not all of them have yet had their contents adequately catalogued in OCLC. The British Library, which has vast holdings of almost every subject under and beyond the sun, at first appeared to me not to be a member. However, I'm no longer sure of this since I did catch a match for one title in the British Library this morning, so perhaps the British Library has recently joined but has yet to have most of its very voluminous catalogues incorporated into the database - certainly virtually all of the astrological titles from the British Library that can be found by searching in the British Library's own website fail to show up on OCLC. In practice, this entails that anyone disappointed by the lack of usefully located UK-based results for particular book-searches in OCLC should at the very least separately check the British Library website before presuming that there is no copy of the book wanted in the British Library, because there probably will be one even if the book is not listed as being in any British library on OCLC.
Secondly, the prevalence of certain classes of literature in libraries is a relatively poor guide to the prevalence of surviving copies in private hands, and thus likely to appear for sale used. While academic astrological textbooks, volumes of essays, and critical editions can often be found in fifty to two-hundred libraries in OCLC, they may be so very scarce in private hands that it is rare to find a single copy for sale on the worldwide used book market, and they may command very high second-hand private sale prices accordingly.
Conversely, non-academic, non-historically-discursive astrological books and journals may have been shunned by the vast majority of libraries worldwide as being of no serious value, and as a consequence the numbers that have survived in OCLC member libraries may be in only single or low double digits, yet there may be significant numbers floating about on the used book market because of a much greater volume of the same works having survived in private ownership.
Still, it is probably fair to presume that in the cases of non-academic astrology books, where ten to twenty copies are found listed in OCLC throughout North America and western Europe, there will be a much higher chance of used copies coming up for private sale than if there are only three to five copies found in OCLC. So as a guide to scarcity and value OCLC still has its uses for collectors.
OCLC can be accessed directly from the home page of www.worldcatlibraries.org. It can take a while to get the hang of using the database in the most efficient way, since the navigation system is a little arcane, and many older works with longer subtitles are found to have been entered under several different names by different libraries, even if the edition is the same. Narrowing results by date of publication is extremely helpful however.
I was looking there earlier today, and discovered for instance that surviving copies of the original first and second editions of Lilly's 'Christian Astrology' are much more numerous than surviving copies of Gadbury's first edition of 'The Doctrine of Nativities' or Partridge's first edition of 'Mikropanastron'. This was slightly surprising to me at first in view of the much higher values commanded by 17th century copies of Christian Astrology on the second-hand market - typically $3250 or more for a copy in sound condition but lacking an original frontispiece portrait, whereas copies of Gadbury are currently available for $1500 and Partridge was recently available for the same price. But then the relative scarcity of the works of Gadbury and Partridge no doubt reflects the greater success of Lilly as an astrological writer in his day, as well as the enduring popularity of his work through the centuries since - many more copies of Christian Astrology were probably produced in the first place; and those that have survived are in high demand from today's astrologers.
Some of the very scarcest of all astrological works both in OCLC member libraries and in private ownership would appear to be journals. Even when I've managed to obtain copies of the vast majority of astrological books of any importance from the 20th century, the same does not hold true of astrological journals. They have either been disposed of as ephemera, or have been stored away in a very limited number of widely dispersed and in many cases poorly identifiable private collections.
It is probably true that anyone who belatedly begins to try to piece together an astrological library including works from the past will struggle in the greatest measure when it comes to collecting complete or even significant past runs of many astrological journals. Established astrological libraries that have subscribed continuously to such journals over decades cannot hope to be equalled in this respect.
Philip
After noticing this a number of times, I naturally found myself asking myself 'What is OCLC and how do I access it?'
What I have discovered so far is that OCLC appears to be a co-operatively run international organisation of participating libraries whose holdings are catalogued within a unified database of books that is freely accessible over the Internet by anyone at all. Thus the idea is that anyone wanting to know where to find a rare or scholarly book to research can simply select the relevant author, title and edition date in OCLC and see a list of all holdings of that book in a particular country.
Since there are many hundreds of libraries, especially in North America and the UK, but also throughout Western Europe, that are members of OCLC, its database serves as a very useful sample of the holdings of libraries across these parts of the world, and thus as a rough indicator of the prevalence of particular books in libraries within North America and Western Europe.
There are a few limitations however:
First and foremost, not all the best libraries are members, or if they are, not all of them have yet had their contents adequately catalogued in OCLC. The British Library, which has vast holdings of almost every subject under and beyond the sun, at first appeared to me not to be a member. However, I'm no longer sure of this since I did catch a match for one title in the British Library this morning, so perhaps the British Library has recently joined but has yet to have most of its very voluminous catalogues incorporated into the database - certainly virtually all of the astrological titles from the British Library that can be found by searching in the British Library's own website fail to show up on OCLC. In practice, this entails that anyone disappointed by the lack of usefully located UK-based results for particular book-searches in OCLC should at the very least separately check the British Library website before presuming that there is no copy of the book wanted in the British Library, because there probably will be one even if the book is not listed as being in any British library on OCLC.
Secondly, the prevalence of certain classes of literature in libraries is a relatively poor guide to the prevalence of surviving copies in private hands, and thus likely to appear for sale used. While academic astrological textbooks, volumes of essays, and critical editions can often be found in fifty to two-hundred libraries in OCLC, they may be so very scarce in private hands that it is rare to find a single copy for sale on the worldwide used book market, and they may command very high second-hand private sale prices accordingly.
Conversely, non-academic, non-historically-discursive astrological books and journals may have been shunned by the vast majority of libraries worldwide as being of no serious value, and as a consequence the numbers that have survived in OCLC member libraries may be in only single or low double digits, yet there may be significant numbers floating about on the used book market because of a much greater volume of the same works having survived in private ownership.
Still, it is probably fair to presume that in the cases of non-academic astrology books, where ten to twenty copies are found listed in OCLC throughout North America and western Europe, there will be a much higher chance of used copies coming up for private sale than if there are only three to five copies found in OCLC. So as a guide to scarcity and value OCLC still has its uses for collectors.
OCLC can be accessed directly from the home page of www.worldcatlibraries.org. It can take a while to get the hang of using the database in the most efficient way, since the navigation system is a little arcane, and many older works with longer subtitles are found to have been entered under several different names by different libraries, even if the edition is the same. Narrowing results by date of publication is extremely helpful however.
I was looking there earlier today, and discovered for instance that surviving copies of the original first and second editions of Lilly's 'Christian Astrology' are much more numerous than surviving copies of Gadbury's first edition of 'The Doctrine of Nativities' or Partridge's first edition of 'Mikropanastron'. This was slightly surprising to me at first in view of the much higher values commanded by 17th century copies of Christian Astrology on the second-hand market - typically $3250 or more for a copy in sound condition but lacking an original frontispiece portrait, whereas copies of Gadbury are currently available for $1500 and Partridge was recently available for the same price. But then the relative scarcity of the works of Gadbury and Partridge no doubt reflects the greater success of Lilly as an astrological writer in his day, as well as the enduring popularity of his work through the centuries since - many more copies of Christian Astrology were probably produced in the first place; and those that have survived are in high demand from today's astrologers.
Some of the very scarcest of all astrological works both in OCLC member libraries and in private ownership would appear to be journals. Even when I've managed to obtain copies of the vast majority of astrological books of any importance from the 20th century, the same does not hold true of astrological journals. They have either been disposed of as ephemera, or have been stored away in a very limited number of widely dispersed and in many cases poorly identifiable private collections.
It is probably true that anyone who belatedly begins to try to piece together an astrological library including works from the past will struggle in the greatest measure when it comes to collecting complete or even significant past runs of many astrological journals. Established astrological libraries that have subscribed continuously to such journals over decades cannot hope to be equalled in this respect.
Philip