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Ireland's global cultural profile, and the widespread interest in "Irishness," can be partially understood through the island's manifestation in the published record. Using WorldCat, this publication offers reflections on the Irish presence in the published record, including its size and salient characteristics, evolving trends, and patterns of global diffusion. While our exploration of the Irish presence is not exhaustive, it does sketch out the contours of this important piece of the overall published record, and hopefully inspires ideas for new modes of inquiry into Ireland's distinctive cultural influence around the world. Not incidentally, this study also highlights the indispensable role of libraries as repositories and caretakers of the creative outputs of Ireland and all nations.

The scholarly record is increasingly digital and networked, while at the same time expanding in both the volume and diversity of the material it contains. The long-term future of the scholarly record cannot be effectively secured with traditional stewardship models developed for print scholarly materials. This paper discusses the evolving scholarly record in the context of challenges raised for securing its long-term preservation and accessibility. We present a view of the salient features of future stewardship models adapted to the characteristics of a digital, networked scholarly record, and discuss practical implications of implementing these models.

Using a mega-regions ("geographical regions defined on the basis of economic integration and other forms of interdependence") framework to model regional consolidation of shared print book library collections, this report explores a counterfactual scenario where local US and Canadian print book library collections are consolidated into regional shared collections. The analysis in this paper builds upon findings from the OCLC Research report, Cloud-sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-digitized Library Environment (2011), and draws upon bibliographic and library holdings data from the WorldCat database.

A country specializing in a high technology industry may find that excess returns stemming from innovation are reallocated overseas as foreign-based multinationals access ongoing domestic R&D through alliances with or acquisition of established domestic start-ups. Computer simulation illustrates this process in the context of the current US specialization in biotechnology. Keywords: Biotechnology, market structure, comparative advantage

Sources of heterogeneity within the process of R&D investment, such as international differences in the maximum per-period rate of investment and level of regulatory uncertainty, offer a plausible explanation for US comparative advantage in biotechnology. Using dynamic stochastic simulation, the results presented in this paper suggest US biotechnology firms may initiate more R&D projects, innovate earlier and more rapidly, persevere longer in the face of mounting R&D costs, and successfully complete more R&D projects than European firms.

Print book collections are facing significant transformation in response to mass digitization, remote storage, and preservation. These issues should be considered within a system-wide context in which individual print book collections are viewed not as isolated units, but rather as parts of a larger whole. As libraries look beyond the boundaries of their local print book collections to consider system-wide implications, they will need to be equipped with data and analysis about the system-wide print book collection. This paper provides a brief overview of the system-wide print book collection, defined as the combined print book holdings of libraries everywhere, as reflected in the WorldCat bibliographic database. Issues addressed include the size of the collection; holdings patterns; distribution by publication date and language; and the relationship of the system-wide print book collection to overall book production. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of some implications of the analysis, and possible directions for future research.

The Office of Research's Web Characterization Project is dedicated to analyzing the Web from the perspective most important to libraries: as an information collection. The project uses automated means to compile a snapshot of the World Wide Web, revealing its size and composition.

The OCLC Office of Research seeks librarians and library professionals to provide input to aid the Web Characterization project. Web characterization, a new field of research, describes the structure, size, usage and content of the Web. Responses to an online survey form will help focus the Web Characterization projects research on meeting the Web-information needs of libraries and librarians.

The Web is often characterized as a universal information space, in the sense that the provision of and access to Web content is open to all. It is well known, however, that the majority of Web content originates from a small group of English-speaking countries, chiefly the United States. This paper examines trends in the internationalization of Web content, and in particular, whether the Web is becoming increasingly globalized as it matures, and to what segment of the world's countries and languages it currently extends. Sample data from 1998 and 1999 suggests that the Web's content is still far from a true global cross-section, but is slowly expanding both in terms of its geographical origins and the languages in which it is made available.