The highs and lows of physical browsing: How shelf position affects book usage in academic libraries

This study sought to address that deficit by measuring 2.25 years of usage statistics of approximately 21,000 books correlated to what shelves they were on.There was a clear preference for in-library use of items stored at the eye level of average patrons. For both checkouts and in-library use, items from the bottom shelf were used the least. When correlated to the different ways books could be discovered and then removed from the shelves, results indicated that physically browsing the shelves biased a patron to choose books at eye level significantly more often and to choose books on the bottom shelf significantly less often.While done in a large, academic library, this research may be useful to any library where books are placed on bookshelves for patrons to browse.
Source: The Journal of Academic Librarianship - Category: Databases & Libraries Source Type: research