Colletion Development Patterns of Fiction Titles in Public Libraries: The Place of Independent and Small Presses

摘要

Recent scholarship has identified increased corporate control of the news and book publishing industries as a worrisome trend insofar as it has meant a decrease in the sites where diverse public expression is allowed to occur Public libraries are major buyers of fiction titles, yet mainstream commercial publishers owned by large conglomerates now publish a large portion of all available fiction espite the proliferation of small, independent presses. This article looks at the fiction purchases of public libraries in the United States which are members of OCLC by type of publisher in the period 1994-1997, and thencompares thse purchases with those of Barnes & Noble bookstores. While Barnes & Noble seems to have significantly increased its purchases from small, independent presses during this four-year period, public libraries have not done so. Yet, ingeneral, public library fiction purchasaes do relect both the availability of independent titles and their rate of appearance in popular collection develoment review tools.