Empowering Library Services through User-Centric Analysis of Co-loan Patterns

By examining loan data from public libraries in South Korea, we seek to understand patterns in user borrowing behaviors and explore thematic connections among borrowed books. The subject headings of 55.5 million book sets borrowed by individual users on the same day were analyzed using ITEM2VEC. We have identified 40 subject heading communities through cosine similarity of each subject vector, and we have labeled each community using a large language model. Two prominent communities were identified: Global Modern Literature and Novels and Children's Literature, Fairy Tales, and Folklore. The latter community was associated with a diverse array of subjects, indicating an expansion in children's reading preferences. The study results will be useful for improving collection development and the relevance of book recommendations, as well as for incorporating user information behavior into traditional library material classification schemes.