Measuring gender diversity in library collections and publications using OCLC metadata

Metadata associated with countries’ publications and library collections across time and topics can help explore the evolution of the diversity of contributors within a field of study and library patrons’ ability to access information by diverse groups of authors. The reasons are simple. First, given publications disseminate knowledge within fields of inquiry, the author/creator metatdata associated with the works provide rich snapshots of persons working within the field. Second, holdings of different types of libraries within a country (i.e., national libraries, research libraries, public libraries, etc.) over time reflect changes in the acquisition policies, and preferences and demographic characteristics of their users. Gender-diversity in library collections helps expand viewpoints, promote dialogue and advance research. Our paper mines OCLC’s Worldcat metadata to explore how publication and acquisition patterns have evolved for materials created by authors of different genders over time, and across fields and different types of libraries within and across countries. This is accomplished by applying tools to infer genders of authors for materials in our sample, and combining this information with: (1) country of publication, (2) field of inquiry identified using the records’ classification codes, (3) date(s) of publication, (4) language(s) associated with the works and their translations, and (5) the number of libraries by major type in different countries holding the material within their collections. Metrics created from this analysis help answer the following questions. First, how has the gender composition of publications across fields changed over time on a global scale, and at a country level? and second, how well do the different collections of various library-types reflect the diversity of the materials available? The investigation should provide important insights into the current level of diversity reflected along this dimension by different library types across countries, and identify gaps in coverage.