Re: Column on licenses

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

In this context, Lotka's law, is the one also referred to as is 
Zipf's Law, or Bradford's law, or many other names, (it has been 
rediscovered a number of times):

The simplest formulation, is the well-known formula that 20% of 
the books will get 80% of the use, and that if you consider only 
that 20%, it still holds within that group. It holds good for 
science journals, and probably journals is similar fields. 
There's a very small top class that gets most of the use. It 
similarly holds good for authors.

The most accessible discussion is the Wikipedia article for 
Bradford's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford%27s_law

Lotka was primarily a statistician. his work in pupulation 
biology led to another law, also called by his name, the 
Lotka-Volterra equation, for the cyclic character of 
predator-prey populations: when the lynx eat up almost all the 
hares, most of them die of hunger. The hares now increase in 
numbers until the remaining lynx start to find them, etc.  (If 
the lynx eat too fast, there aren't enough left to reproduce, and 
both population die.)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka-Volterra_equation

I do not know of any direct application of this to information 
science. It may sound like it applies to publishers and research 
libraries, but if the publishers kill almost all the libraries, 
and die because of lack of customers, neither will recover. Hare 
and lynx are self-regenerating, but neither publishers nor 
libraries are able to reproduce.

(There's a second equation of his in population biology also--see 
the refs)

Forgive me for drastically oversimplifying, but Bensman explains 
this better than I can. see his introductory paper at 
www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/bensman/urquhartlaw1.pdf . and his 
other papers: www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/bensman/bensman.html

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu


----- Original Message -----
From: Ari Belenkiy <belenka@mail.biu.ac.il>
Date: Monday, October 23, 2006 9:57 pm
Subject: Re: Column on licenses
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> David Goodman wrote:
>
>> This is one of the consequences of Lotka's Law, which applies
>> to books as well as to journal articles.
>
> Can you please formulate it in its "library" sense?
>
> It must have predators and prey in its original version.
>
> Ari Belenkiy