Characteristics and Use of Personal Collections

This article reports a study of the characteristics of personal collections of a sample of authors drawn from the general fields of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and the relationship between the size and composition of their collections and the location of works referred to in certain of their recent papers. It was found that the largest proportion of works cited was located in personal collections, a smaller proportion was located in libraries in departments and institutions to which respondents belonged, and the smallest proportion was located in libraries in other cities and countries. Several measures of the number of cited works were devised to facilitate comparisons between different kinds of materials cited in papers in different fields. The reasons why respondents built up and maintained personal collections were also studied. The methodology of the study involved a questionnaire, telephone interviews, and actual counts by the investigator of a number of collections.