On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, Christopher Tong wrote, in response to my comment:
> > However, there is some evidence that in statistics (perhaps more
> > than in most disciplines) there is a strong interaction between
> > writing style and reading style, especially at introductory levels;
> > and perhaps your best strategy would be to immerse yourself for a
> > time in your university library, reviewing a fair spectrum of books
> > that deal with multiple regression, and taking home the ones you find
> > most eminently readable.
>
> I did so at our math library, and walked out with only Montgomery &
> Peck, impressed with it but disappointed at almost everything else.
> However, I suspect that the other good books were so popular that they
> were checked out. ... ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
An interesting conjecture! But it might be useful not to restrict your
attention to the _math_ library (if I interpret you correctly?). Once I
delved into our library at OISE (a graduate school of education, which at
that time had nine or ten departments and about 120 full-time faculty)
hunting for a spectrum of elementary statistics textbooks. I found that
such textbooks were variously catalogued (I still don't know why, though
I have a conjecture) in three different and widely separated parts of the
stacks. It may (?) be pertinent that the classification system used was
Dewey Decimal, not Library of Congress. If I had not had maybe half a
dozen text titles (mostly my own books) to look up in the catalogue, I
might not have found this out. As I now vaguely recall (the event
recounted was perhaps 20 years ago), some texts were shelved with the
"statistics" books; some were shelved with the "research methods"
books; and I don't remember what the other section dealt with, possibly
"mathematics".
Whether a similar phenomenon would be found for books on
multiple regression and linear models I don't know; and whether that
phenomenon be true for other libraries and/or other cataloguing systems I
don't know either, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I conjecture that books are catalogued by librarians, probably
based on their understanding and interpretation of (a) the book title,
(b) the publisher's blurb on the slip-cover, and one cannot expect all
librarians to be erudite in all possible fields of study...
-- Don.
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Donald F. Burrill [EMAIL PROTECTED]
348 Hyde Hall, Plymouth State College, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
MSC #29, Plymouth, NH 03264 603-535-2597
184 Nashua Road, Bedford, NH 03110 603-471-7128
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