Theos-Talk Archives (December 1995 Message tl00311)

Continuing my research into WorldCat titles for various
religious movements of the 19th century.

One can search by any of a number of languages. A search for
book titles published in the 1990s about six religions in six
languages revealed the following:

English Spanish German French Russian Japanese
Mormon 1421 12 00 4 01 1

Adventist 925 32 08 3 01 1

Spiritualist 428 42 06 29 12 17

C. Science 239 03 3 02 1 01

Baha'i 203 07 1 01 0 00

Theosophy 118 20 09 4 32 00

For Theosophists this is an encouraging picture. In German
and Russian there are more new books on Theosophy than any
other of the 06 traditions. In Spanish French and English
Theosophy's publishing presence is comparable to those of
groups dozens of times larger.

For Baha'is it would appear that English-language works are
a disproportionately *high* percentage compared to other
groups or to Baha'i membership statistics. Raising questions
about database coverage.

Another search looked for new titles in the 1990s on the world
religions in all languages. The totals: Christianity 45034
Judaism 15649 Islam 10745 Buddhism 7432 Hinduism 3050
Sikhism 359 Baha'i 255. Even allowing for some distortion
caused by a North American databse this shows Judaism
Christianity and Buddhism to be producing far more literary
works in relation to their memberships than is found in the
cases of Islam Hinduism Sikhism and Baha'i. BTW a listing of the
titles under Islam shows them overwhelmingly in Arabic and
other non-European languages indicating OCLC's coverage.