Readers' demands for library books. Survey of lending and reading room usage characteristics

Abstract

The survey presented analyzes 8311 book requests by library patrons. The language distribution of the requested books is: 69% Hungarian, 22.1% English, 5.7% German, 2.3% Russian, 0.9% other. Thls distribution corresponds well to that of the books available in the library. In contrary to the demands for journals, decrease for book requests is slower than the age of books grows but faster than in non-technical collections. 86.8% of book requests was in scientific and technical subject fields. The most popular fields were computer technology (28.35%) and electricai engineering (14.78%). The distribution of not immediately satisfied requests was: 20% of Hungarian books, 18.8% of German books and 3.1% of Russian books. The main reason of failure was that the requested books had been on loan. 67% of requests were satisfied by the lending service, and 33% in the reading room for local use.