Just heard a fascinating talk by Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC about some of the research projects going on there. One neat observation: the number of libraries holding a book represents something of an equivalent to Google PageRank, in “harnessing the collective intelligence of librarians” about what are the most important works of Western culture. (Obviously, the list is biased towards certain types of works typically held by libraries, such as books and classical music.)
One outcome is the list of the Top 1000 works in library holdings. The top ten: The Bible. the US Census. Mother Goose, the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey, the Iliad, Huck Finn, Lord of the Rings, Hamlet, Alice in Wonderland. A lovely browse for book lovers.
Using a different metric — the number of different editions* — the top ten fiction works are Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, David Copperfield. (More precisely, the metric is not “editions” but the number of different “expressions”, which is a step higher than an edition in the OCLC’s logical hierarchy. You have a work, realized through an expression (e.g. an illustrated edition, a Spanish edition, an abridged edition, a spoken word edition), embodied in a manifestation (the 1954 Penguin edition), and an item (an actual copy of that manifestation.))
Lorcan also says that they are planning to offer a web service to look up the library holding rank for any title. Nice!