Global Currents

Ever wonder how many books are written in a given language? Although the numbers are not precise, OCLC provides us with some idea. OCLC is the world’s largest library cooperative holding records to over 1,600,000,000 items and used by 72,000 libraries worldwide. OCLC supports WorldCat many of you are familiar with. Overall facts and statistics about this catalog can be found at http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/statistics/default.htm. A recent study by members of the Western European Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries involved estimating the number of foreign language items held by U.S. libraries. The results for titles copyrighted after 1923 were as follows:

Book titles published in the US - 26,710,400

Book titles published outside the US ("Foreign") - 78,017,300

Foreign book titles, held by US libraries - 22,801,900

Copies of foreign book titles ("holdings") worldwide - 461,596,000

US libraries' holdings of foreign book titles - 203,953,200

If you are trying to find titles in other languages, contact your local librarian! If you are looking for help with Slavic, East European, Eurasian, Turkish or Persian titles, contact GIVES for assistance.

The University Library has recently purchased several items in electronic format that should be of interest to students and scholars of global studies. The online versions of the Oxford Handbooks in Political Science include titles related to American and British politics, comparative politics, international relations, law and politics, political economy, public policy, and the United Nations. A “Quick Search” allows you to search the entire site or a title of interest for specific terms. The site also allows you to search the bibliographies of the collection of handbooks, something good scholars are very familiar with. In addition, the University Library Discover Link is found on most of the references listed in bibliographies. We hope you will enjoy using this for your research and classrooms. The list will be updated as new handbooks are published. To see the entire list of handbooks go to the Online Research Resources page and search for Oxford Handbook.