Tyranny of Distance: Understanding Academic Library Browsing by Refining the Neighbour Effect

Browsing is a part of book seeking that is important to readers, poorly understood, and ill supported in digital libraries. In earlier work, we attempted to understand the impact of browsing on book borrowing by examining whether books near other loaned books were more likely to be loaned themselves, a phenomenon we termed the neighbour effect. In this paper we further examine the neighbour effect, looking specifically at size, interaction with search and topic boundaries, increasing our understanding of browsing behaviour.