Nigerian book trade

Abstract

Laws for public library service were well established in Czechoslovakia before its split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. The transfer of authority over public libraries from the central government to the local regions and municipalities after 1989 caused much confusion, especially since many library buildings were reclaimed by the owners from whom they had been confiscated by the Communists. The number of libraries in the country has declined since 1989. The shift of publishers to free market conditions meant not only that much “entertainment” literature was published, but also that the price of books was driven up. Library services have changed to meet the new social conditions: there are improved services for business and for the handicapped.     

Modeling scholarly book literature

Recent technology provides the means to gauge the declining ability of the nation's research libraries to maintain fairly comprehensive book collections in the face of the extraordinary growth and price inflation of scholarly publishing since the 1970s. An application of this technology is presented here in the form of a model of total book publication output and the aggregate holdings of 71 research libraries in a selected field, general sociology, for the period 1979–88. The usefulness of such modeling is discussed in terms of generating knowledge that, while low on precision, has broad reliability and relevance.