Most titles are published only once—with no subsequent editions, no translations into other languages. At OCLC we refer to such titles as they appear in WorldCat as “singleton worksets.” And there are a lot of them.
How many? My colleague Jenny Toves provided statistics. WorldCat has 207 million worksets, and 80% are singletons. The accompanying pie chart shows the percentage of WorldCat worksets with one, two, three, four and five or more “manifestations” – those with various reproductions, editions, translations, etc.
That pie sliver for “five or more” manifestations masks that there are also huge worksets. Thirty-one thousand worksets in WorldCat include100 or more manifestations. Dante’s La Divina Commedia is the largest, with 6,875 manifestations. The snippet from the WorldCat display of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress at the top of this blog post represents the fourth largest workset. Care to guess what works comprise the other eight of WorldCat’s Ten Largest Worksets?
Check your answers with the list below.
As Karen points out, most worksets are singletons – 80% of worksets. Two things that I find interesting about those singleton worksets: 1) only 48% of the records are in those worksets and 2) only 15% of the holdings.