A model of the publishing universe

Fahy and Bosch both work at the Universi ty of Arizona Libra ry in Tucson. Fahy is head acquisitions l ibrarian and Bosch is acquisitions l ibrarian. At the Universi ty of Arizona Library a preliminary at tempt has been made to construct a statistical model of the publishing envi ronment in which academic libraries acquire materials. We are attempting to define the publishing universe within which collection development operates. What is the total value of books and serials published in a given subject area? What is the ratio of the total value of books compared to the total value of serials? What percentage of this "universe" does the university's l ibrary purchase? Our object ive in creating this model is to provide us with bet ter informat ion on the relationship between our collecting activities and the publishing world. We also hope that such a model will serve other institutions in the same understanding and inspire them to improve the model. This publishing model has been constructed using data available in the Bowker Annual and from data supplied by the Faxon Company. One major problem we faced was the lack of detailed statistics that adequately described monographic and serial publishing of academic materials. Despite the lack of valid statistical resources for all parts of the model, we decided that something is better than nothing. With the cooperat ion of the Faxon Company, we constructed a universe for serial publishing based on data f rom their database of close to 200,000 titles. For our purposes, we assumed that this quanti ty of titles represented the best possible def ini t ion of the publishing universe for serials, both foreign and domestic. The Faxon Company provided us with a sorted and summarized version of their database and we arranged and compiled the data in subject classes comparable to those