THE RELATIVE SHELF LOCATION OF CIRCULATED BOOKS - A STUDY OF CLASSIFICATION, USERS, AND BROWSING

Patrons often browse through books organized by a library classificati on system, looking for books to use and possibly circulate. This resea rch is an examination of the clustering of similar books provided by a classification system and ways in which the books that patrons circul ate are clustered. Measures of classfication system performance are su ggested and used to evaluate two test collections. Regression formulas are derived describing the relationships among the number of areas in which books were found (the number of stops a patron makes when brows ing), the distances across a cluster, and the average number of books a patron circulates. Patrons were found usually to make more stops tha n there were books found at their average stop. Consequences for full- text document systems and online catalogs are suggested.