• The Absolutely Most Frequently-Owned Title on the list--owned by some 403,252 member libraries--is not, say, Huckleberry Finn (that's #7) or even the Bible (#2) but the U.S. Census.
  
  
• The most commonly-owned non-government document is a children's classic, Mother Goose. Many of the other titles in the top 100 were written for children. For example, three more libraries own The Very Hungry Caterpillar than own Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
  
  
• Collections of comic strips are owned by more libraries than some of the world's most famous literary classics: Garfield at Large is #18 (Macbeth is #19), Calvin & Hobbes is #148 (#149 is To Kill a Mockingbird), and Dilbert (at #448) outranks Jane Austen's Persuasion (#449).
  
  
• Several nonfiction works (such as Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail, #154) are owned by more libraries than a slew of well-known novels; the relatively high rank of works of scholarship such as H.W. Janson's The History of Art (#191) remind the reader that many OCLC members are academic libraries.
  
  
• Scriptures of various religions rank high on the list, including several high-ranking Eastern classics (The Bhagavadgita is up there at #21; the Upanishads, #188, outranks The Dead Sea Scrolls, #177).
  
  
• Modern advertising apparently affects the ranking of many titles. For example, more libraries own Richard Bolles' What Color is My Parachute (#269) than own Francis Bacon's Essays (#271).
  
  
• Selectors at medium-sized and smaller AFPL branches might want to scan the OCLC list to remind them of older items they may not realize are almost universally owned by U.S. libraries--titles like John Hersey's Hiroshima (#333).
  
  
• One of the most intriguing features of the OCLC Top 1,000 is the fact that it includes music titles. All the music titles listed are Western classics--not a single Beatles or Rolling Stone album made the list. Selectors at AFPL branches that maintain a collection of classical music recordings could use the OCLC list to make sure their collections contain all The Biggies from the Western musical canon.

"Not so long ago, people were predicting the decline of the printed book. Riding the wave of digital delirium that accompanied the rise of the Internet, pundits were convinced that downloading would spell the hardcover's downfall, envisioning a world of readers with their faces aglow devouring the latest literary page-scroller.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the future: People kept buying books. As clunky and old-fangled as the idea of a hefty tome might be, there's just something about pulling a book off its shelf, cracking it open, and smoothing your hand over that first, supple page.

Readers don't just own books; we live with them. We admire the way they look resting on a polished coffee table. We fold them across our chests for a moment's pause after a moving chapter. We take them along for the ride. I enjoy the rough look of a paperback that has survived, say, a camping trip. Its weathered pages and curled corners speak not only to where I've been with it, but also to where it's taken me."

• Sources of library revenue (totals and percentages)
  
• Checkout data (totals; total percentage increase over last year; total value of checked-out items if purchased instead of borrowed)
  
• Holds data (total number and total and percentage of Holds items placed by patrons via computer)
  
• Questions asked (total)
  
• Library visits (in-person visit totals; branch totals; total visits to library’s web site)
  
• Collection size (totals for print collection; total for nonprint items; total number of licensed databases)
• County population vs. total number of registered borrowers and total number of new customers registered
  
• Average number of items borrowed per cardholder per year
  
• Library program attendance totals
  

"I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles....

The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

“When the vast potential of the Web was first glimpsed, scholars were drunk with excitement about the intellectual possibilities, and rightly so. Here was a wonder worthy of science fiction, where in theory any person in the world could, with a few keystrokes, have access to all humankind’s collective learning-science, art, history, philosophy, religious texts, and knock-knock jokes.

Suffering the hangover of reality, their heads throbbing from blinking banner ads, pop-ups, pornographic spam, and viruses, those visionaries may be wondering whether they’re looking at a cathedral of learning or a stripmall of sleaze. But still, those who have little interest in using cyberspace to hawk penis-enlargement technology toil on. Internet information may be notoriously unreliable, but the increasing amounts of digitized primary-source documents do much to counterbalance that failing….Finding this stuff is easy-just type American history primary sources into Google, or the name of the document (quotes are helpful) if you know what it is. Do, however, take a look at who posted the materials. As a general rule, www.yale.edu is a better bet than www.billybobsweekendfunzone.com. Although Billy Bob may just have been kind enough to scan his family’s authentic, handwritten copy of the Emancipation Proclamation….”

• Judge Orders Thieving Director to Repay $22K to Library
  
• Board Member Admits to Stealing $30K from Library Funds
  
• Auditors Find Money Stolen from Fort Worth PL

• a gathering place for the community
• a self-improvement center
• an idea factory
• a culture center
• a place for kids
• an education resource (the model-or at least the slogan--adopted by AFPL: “The People’s University”)
• “a place for reading” (AFPLWATCH’s fave, but way too radical for the likes of Hooker & Co.)

• a catalog that gives the user not only an item's call number but a map showing the user exactly where in the building to find it.
• a book sorter resembling an airport's luggage conveyer belt that snakes from the door of the fourth-floor entrance up through the ceiling. The system whisks books from the mouth of the return bin and uses radio chips embedded in each book to automatically take them to the correct bin or branch truck.
• stack-at-a-time checkout stations.

• A mere five veteran authors-James Patterson, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Danielle Steel-accounted for 14 titles on the list. Only eight titles by new authors made the 2003 lists (plus two more previously unpublished authors whose 2002 books stayed on the list well into 2003).
• Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code was at the top of PW’s bestseller lists for 25 of the 39 weeks it was on the 2003 list-and it’s still #1 in the latter weeks of January 2004.
• In 2003, 420 books hit the bestseller charts for the first time, and that figure has remained approximately the same for the past several years.