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Date

17.12.2013 11:02:22

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Abstract

The British controversy over the validity of Urquhart's and Garfield's Laws during the 1970s constitutes an important episode in the formulation of the probability structure of human knowledge. This controversy took place within the historical context of the convergence of two scientific revolutions-the bibliometric and the biometric-that had been launched in Britain. The preceding decades had witnessed major breakthroughs in understanding the probability distributions underlying the use of human knowledge. Two of the most important of these breakthroughs were the laws posited by Donald J. Urquhart and Eugene Garfield, who played major roles in establishing the institutional bases of the bibliometric revolution. For his part, Urquhart began his realization of S. C. Bradford's concept of a national science library by analyzing the borrowing of journals on interlibrary loan from the Science Museum Library in 1956. He found that 10% of the journals accounted for 80% of the loans and formulated Urquhart's Law, by which the interlibrary use of a journal is a measure of its total use. This law underlay the operations of the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (NLLST), which Urquhart founded. The NLLST became the British Library Lending Division (BLLD) and ultimately the British Library Document Supply Centre (BLDSC). In contrast, Garfield did a study of 1969 journal citations as part of the process of creating the Science Citation Index (SCI), formulating his Law of Concentration, by which the bulk of the information needs in science can be satisfied by a relatively small, multidisciplinary core of journals. This law became the operational principle of the Institute for Scientif ic Information created by Garfield. A study at the BLLD under Urquhart's successor, Maurice B. Line, found low correlations of NLLST use with SCI citations, and publication of this study started a major controversy, during which both laws were called into question. The study was based on the faulty use of the Spearman rank correlation coefficient, and the controversy over it was instrumental in causing B. C. Brookes to investigate bibliometric laws as probabilistic phenomena and begin to link the bibliometric with the biometric revolution. This paper concludes with a resolution of the controversy by means of a statistical technique that incorporates Brookes' criticism of the Spearman rank-correlation method and demonstrates the mutual supportiveness of the two laws

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Abstract

In this article, I analyze the role of Donald J. Urquhart in the creation of modern library and information science. Urquhart was one of the chief architects of information science in Britain and founder of the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (NLL), which evolved into the present-day British Library Document Supply Centre (BLDSC). In particular, I focus an the part played by Urquhart in the development of that branch of information science termed bibliomefrics, the application of mathematical and statistical techniques to information phenomena, pursuing both historical and practical aims. The article is intended not only to trace the history of the probability distributions applicable to library use and other facets of human knowledge but also to demonstrate how these distributions can be used in the evaluation and management of scientific journal collections. For these purposes, the paper is divided into three parts of equal importance. The first part is statistical and establishes the theoretical framework, within which Urquhart's work is considered. It traces the historical development of the applicable probability distributions, discussing their origins an the European continent and how Continental principles became incorporated in the biometric statistics that arose in Britain as a result of the Darwinian revolution. This part analyzes the binomial and Poisson processes, laying out the reasons why the Poisson process is more suitable for modeling information phenomena. In doing so, it describes key distributions arising from these processes as weil as the various tests for these distributions, citing the literature that shows how to conduct these tests. Throughout the discussion, the relationship of these distributions to library use and the laws of information science is emphasized. The second part of the article analyzes the pioneering role of Urquhart as a conduit for the entry of these probability distributions into librarianship, converting it into library and information science. He was the first librarian to apply probability to library use, utilizing it not only to establish and manage the scientific journal collections of the NLL but also to evolve his Law of Supralibrary Use. Urquhart's work is portrayed within the context of a general trend to adopt probabilistic methods for analytical purposes, and a major premise of this article is that his law and the probabilistic breakthrough, an which it was based, were most likely in Britain, which was one of the few countries not only to develop but also maintain the necessary scientific preconditions. The third-and concluding section-discusses how Urquhart's Law forces a probabilistic reconceptualization of the functioning of the scientific journal system as weIl as the law's practical implications for journal sales, collection evaluation and management, resource sharing, and the transition from the paper to the electronic format.