Lend me some sugar: Borrowing rates of neighbouring books as evidence for browsing

Abstract

There is more to choosing a book than simply keyword searching. Browsing is a fundamental part of the information seeking process, and one that information seekers profess to value, though it has attracted little study. This dearth of research is undoubtedly in part because browsing is nebulous and difficult to quantify. In this paper we use a large circulation dataset from an academic library consortium to examine whether books in the library stacks are loaned in clusters, with a view firstly to confirming the existence of book browsing that has been reported anecdotally, and secondly to quantifying its impact on loan patterns.