A Study on Finding Potential Group of Patrons from Library's Loan Records

Social networking services that connect a person to other people are attracting people's attention and various types of services are provided on the Internet. Library has been playing a role of social media by providing us with materials such as books and magazines, and with a place for reading, studying, getting lectures, etc. In this paper, we present a method for finding candidates of groups of the library's patrons who share interest areas by utilizing the loan records, which are obtainable in every library. Such a homogeneous group can become a candidate for a study group, a community for exchange ideas, and other activity group. We apply the method to a collection of loan records of a university library, find some problems to be solved, and propose measures for more detailed solutions. Even though the potential group finding problem still remains a lot of issues to be solved, its potential importance is very high and thus to be studies even more for future applications.