Jane Austen one of top 100 identities in OCLC project
Alert Janeite Eileen wrote to tell us that Jane Austen is one of only four women listed in the top 100 of the WorldCat Identities project. Eileen commented,
And the four represent an interesting cross section of our gender!
Jane Austen
Agatha Christie
Mary, Blessed Virgin
Virginia Woolf
That’s an interesting combination of women, all right! 
We asked Eileen for more information about the project, and she told us:
This is a project that is experimenting with ways to improve how library catalogs work. It uses the OCLC WorldCat database, which is the largest database of library holdings in the world. You can search on an author, composer or even a fictional character and the results returned are organized in a more intuitive manner than most library catalogs. . .It’s still experimental and clearly has some work to do (it classes The Jane Austen Book Club as a work about Jane Austen). But let’s say you’re just getting into Jane. Clicking on her identity leads you to a list of books she wrote, as well as books about her, cross references and related subjects. All in one place.
Eileen also sent a link to the aggregate data for Jane Austen so far on the project. This is an amazing project, and will be incredibly useful (and obsession-generating) to those of us who can never get enough information on our favorite subjects. Eileen also sent a link about the project that explains it pretty succinctly:
The idea of WorldCat Identities is simple: create a summary page for every name in WorldCat.
One of our favorite aphorisms is: Librarians Rock! Because you do. 
February 15th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Librarians do indeed rock.
February 15th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Librarians and libraries are great resources. They do rock!
February 15th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Hmm, I don’t know about the data that they show: both in the nice little bar graph and in the verbiage they reference something on the order of 7,000 works “by” Jane Austen, meaning that they are counting every edition of the novels & letters ever published. I suppose in the grossest sense this does make it easier to compare popularity of one author versus another, but it seems like a weird concept to me….wait! no! let me put my MBA to work (at last). To compare JA to, say, Sir Walter Scott or Dickens, one would have to take each author’s number of works divided by the number of total editions in order to compare apples to apples: both Dickens & Scott wrote more books than Austen (that is, their numerators are larger) but the latter, in particular,probably has fewer editions than she. So Austen’s ratio is 6 divided by about 7,000, whereas Scott’s something on the order of, what, about 45 books divided by 4,484 “editions.” The smaller the number, the greater the popularity factor.
At any rate, it seems like a wierd use of numbers to me.
February 17th, 2008 at 8:47 am
As Allison T. indicates, some of the data looks odd. For instance, the list headed “Most Widely Held Works about JA.” In fifth place is Cassandra’s Sister by Veronica Bennett. If you go to the WorldCat record for that book, it indicates that it is held by 603 libraries. And yet, the equivalent record for the book Jane Austen and the Clergy by Irene Collins, indicates that it is held by 640 libraries, so why doesn’t it make the top five? I believe there are dozens of books about Jane Austen held by more libraries that some of these in this list.
I like the list of alternative names, though. There are two in cyrillic that look the same.. are they Russian and Ukrainian? Anyone know?
February 17th, 2008 at 8:58 am
I just looked in the subscription version of WorldCat (the one you can use in a library, as opposed to “Open WorldCat”, the free version..) and it tells me that Cassandra’s Sister is held by 2200 libraries, not 603 libraries as shown in “Open WorldCat.” They both list the same two editions, one UK and one US. So what’s up here?
February 18th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
I’m one of those responsible for WorldCat Identities and can answer some of the comments.
The Jane Austen Book Club was listed in the ‘About’ section because it was cataloged with Jane in a subject heading (as Appreciation–Fiction). We might want to skip those, but it is sort of interesting.
I don’t understand where the 603 libraries came from for Cassandra’s Sister. The current count is 2,198 and you don’t need a subscription to see it.
Yes, the ‘work’ count is a bit iffy for someone like Jane. We try to collapse these down, but it is hard when there are so many editions with slightly different titles, different compilations, etc. Our latest count is 2,050 (down from 2,381 on the current site). The 7,000 figure does count all the editions, and isn’t really surprising.
There is a typo in the first name of one of the Cyrillic headings (an ‘m’ rather than an ‘n’ (which looks like an H in Cyrillic).
–Th