A few weeks go, Walt Crawford took exception to a point I was making about collection bias. His sententious reaction to my accusation. "Bull".

Having now had an opportunity to sufficiently ramp up for a new semester; greet and meet new faculty, hire a new librarian, some obligatory meetings, a treat of new Post-It Notes from the supply cabinet...., I thought it may be interesting to revisit Walt's thoughts on what he concludes to be an example of overrepresentation of right-wing rant.

You want a comparison to show how left-wing those Texas librarians are? Look up the "other" Shut Up & Sing, a right-wing Regnery screed ranking around 86,000 on the Amazon charts. Oh look: 33 holdings in Texas libraries. Almost three times as many as the much better known, much more popular DVD. Hmm.

Well I have looked into Laura Ingraham's Shut Up & Sing. First, a quick refresher.

I worked up this little formula a while back when writing about collection bias. The piece was called 223 to 1.

'Holdings/Weeks on the Top 150" score formula:

number of OCLC holding libraries / weeks on the top 150

example: A title held by 1000 libraries that spent 10 weeks on the top 150 list would have a score of 100.

" Holdings/Highest Rank on the Top 150" score formula:

number of OCLC holding libraries / (151 - highest rank)

example: A title held by 1000 libraries that had a high ranking of 10 would have a score of 7.

Essentially, the higher the quotient, the more likely the title of being overly collected with respect to popular demand in way of sales. So I plugged in Walt's nominee, Ingraham's Shut Up and Sing and found its quotient to be remarkably consistent as with the other conservative titles I previously sampled in 223 to 1.

A quick look-see:

USA Today Best-Selling Book Database rankings for Shut Up and Sing.

Weeks in Top 150 - 5

Peak Position - 48 (Not sure about Walt's 86,000 ranking with Amazon)

Now the plugging and chugging.

Ingraham's screed is held in 1093 libraries per WorldCat, giving us a 218.6 Holdings to Weeks on the Top 150 quotient, and 10.6 for Holding to Highest Rank on the Top 150. Funny how some things never change, better, haven't changed. Here are the averages I found with randomly selected titles a few years back.

• Holdings to Weeks on the Top 150 - Conservatively Biased Books - 184
• Holding to Highest Rank on the Top 150- Conservatively Biased Books - 11
• Holdings to Weeks on the Top 150 - Liberally Biased Books - 290
• Holding to Highest Rank on the Top 150- Liberally Biased Books - 21

Take a breath. No. It's not scientific. But I don't consider it specious either. But if any colleagues have a better means of quantifying.......