Lavoie, Brian, and Lorcan Dempsey. 2018. An Exploration of the Irish Presence in the Published Record. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research. doi:10.25333/C3WS6R

OCLC Research has just published a report investigating how many Ireland-related works exist in the “published record”.  Using computational analysis of the contents of WorldCat, a database of more than 16,000 library holdings worldwide, authors, Brian Lavoie and Lorcan Dempsey have used the catalogue’s descriptive metadata to identify the Irish presence and create a corpus of publications associated with Ireland and its people.

An Exploration of the Irish Presence in the Published Record  also highlights the “indispensible role of libraries as repositories and caretakers of the creative outputs of Ireland and all nations” (p.7).

Surprisingly, McGill University Library’s collection of Irish works places it in the top ten list of libraries in the world with the greatest concentrations of materials with Irish presence.

“An Irish university, Trinity College Dublin, leads the ranking as the institution with the highest number of publications from the Irish presence in the world (table 13). Two other Irish institutions place on the list—University College Dublin and University College Cork—as well as two UK universities, University of Oxford and University of Cambridge. The US leads with four institutions, including three universities and one public library, and Canada’s McGill University rounds out a strong North American presence on the list” (p. 24).

The most popular work published by an Irish author?

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift!

Read the full report here.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin purchased Gabriel García Márquez’s archive two years ago and has now made about half of the collection available for free online. One Hundred Years of Solitude was one of the first books of adult fiction I read and it opened me up to the possibilities of literature and storytelling. Of course García Márquez is known for so much more and now fans and researchers can delve deep into the Nobel Prize winner’s drafts, notebooks, photographs, and other material in over 27,000 pages of digitized content. Read the New York Times article to learn more about the archive. From the article: “Many archives are digitizing their holdings. But to make so much material from a writer whose work is still under copyright freely available online is unusual.” Unusual indeed and very exciting.