Library and Information Science

Catalog use is studied by intermittent photography with a commonly available 8 mm camera. Over 3,000 frames, covering 5 hours at 5 sec. interval, are obtained in each test. Six out of seven tests are done at a title catalog cabinets (for Japanese books) of the Keio University library and as a comparison one test at the Tokyo Keizai Daigaku library by courtesy of the director. It is found that about 100–200 persons consulted the catalog in 5-hour period. On the average 3 min. are spent by individual, but the distribution shows very slow decrease towards the longer end. This suggests simple known-item search on shorter side and relatively comprehensive bibliographic survey on the longer side. Some of the long-time users revisits the catalog several times in a day. The number of catalog users apparently changes according to daily schedule on the campus. A bottleneck of this method lies in the process of identifying and digitizing the images on the screen, because it is too time-consuming but not easily mechanizable. Also it is strongly restricted by physical environments.