Representativeness of Our Collection

How might we go about determining how representative of all existing fiction in English our own collection is? If our collection was made up of entirely first editions, all we would need to do would be to check each decade with the appropriate bibliographies (although this would be easier to do for British than for American novels). However, as we know, this is not the case. So your challenge is to come up with a useful series of questions and answers about our collection's representativeness.

Please record your thoughts in the blog.