Urquhart’s Law: Probability and the Management of Scientific and Technical Journal Collections Part 1. The Law’s Initial Formulation and Statistical Bases

The topic of this paper is a law formulated by Donald J. Urquhart on the use of scientific and technical (sci/tech) journals through interlibrary loan and central document delivery. The paper will be published in three parts. Part 1 discusses the genesis of the law and the probabilistic theory on which it is based. A primary aim of this part is to teach librarians about the probability distributions underlying library use and how to identify these distributions through simple mathematical and graphical techniques. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]