Abstract

There has been research to understand users’ information behaviors using book circulation data of public libraries. In this study, we examined the subject areas of books simultaneously borrowed by users of public libraries and aimed to identify the relationships among the subject areas. To accomplish this, we utilized the Korean Decimal Classification codes of 984,790 loaned books in 2019 to transform the lists of concurrently borrowed books, totaling 22,443,699 records, by the same users on the same day, into vectors using the ITEM2VEC technique. Next, we extracted ten highly related classification codes for each classification code, utilizing a total of 522 classification codes to create a network. We identified 15 communities within this network and examined the characteristics of each community. Among the 15 communities, those consisting of two or more main classes allowed us to identify meaningful thematic associations. This study, grounded in users’ book usage behaviors, has suggested the topics of books that could be borrowed together. The findings offer valuable insights for library collection development and placement, recommending related subject materials, and revising classification systems.