An Experiment Using Coordinate Title Word Searches

produce new information to improve retrievability of books in libraries, explores the effectiveness of retrieving a known-item book using words from titles only. From daily printouts of circulation records at the Walter Royal Davis Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 749 titles were taken and then searched on the 4-million entry catalog at the library of the University of Michigan. The principal finding was that searches produced titles having personal authors 81.4% of the time and anonymous titles 91.5% of the time; these figures are 15 and 5%, respectively, lower than the lowest findings presented in the previous three articles of this series (Kilgour, 1995; 1997; 2001).