Thank you for the link to your article.

I think in both cases, we are going back to first principles so it is reasonable we should both mention Ranganathan in this context..

In my previous life, I had access to a very large database of circulation transactions and working with the data led me back to Fussler and Simon’s Patterns of Use… and other classic use studies. I believe that use studies are the second oldest empirical study in the field. Early treatments go back to the late 1930s.

These early studies never could analyze the large sets of data we do but the authors of these studies thought deeply about what they saw. I found evidence for many of their speculations made with substantially smaller sets of data when I was working with astonishingly large sets of circulation transactions.

The data from large consortia such as PINES should provide us more insights into patterns of use.

Interested to see your Ranganathan references. I frame some of the discussion in my paper on libraries and the long tail in terms of some of the 5 laws.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april06/dempsey/04dempsey.html

Here is the opening:

“Discussions of the long tail that I have seen or heard in the library community strike me as somewhat partial. Much of that discussion is about how libraries contain deep and rich collections, and about how their system-wide aggregation represents a very long tail of scholarly and cultural materials (a system may be at the level of a consortium, or a state, or a country). However, I am not sure that we have absorbed the real relevance of the long tail argument, which is about how well supply and demand are matched in a network environment. It is not enough for materials to be present within the system: they have to be readily accessible (‘every reader his or her book’, in Ranganathan’s terms), potentially interested readers have to be aware of them (‘every book its reader’), and the system for matching supply and demand has to be efficient (’save the time of the user’).”