Abstract
Does the strength of relationship between the quality of a book collection and its circulation increase as the collection becomes older? To examine this question circulation data for a collection of academic books were collected for an early period and a later period and book review evaluations from Choice were regressed on these data for each period. The regression coefficients for the two periods were compared to determine if an increase occurred in the later period. The increase was quite small and not statistically significant. The procedure was repeated for books in the humanities and in the social sciences with the same results. 1
Keywords
Books, Quality, Circulation
Published in:
Collection Management, 20(3/4 1996): 149-56.
Date of this Version
January 1996
COinS
Comments
When I did this research in 1996, I assumed a robust normal distribution for the residuals. While the normal distribution is robust, if I were doing this research today, I would also do a bootstrap for the beta coeficients to further strenghen the conclusions. This should, however, in no way change the conclusions of the research.