Finding fiction: Known items or good books to read

The major part of book loans in public libraries consists of fiction. Its proportion of all adult book loans was e.g. in 2005 in the Netherlands 73 % (Huysmans & Hillebrink 2008) and in 2007 in Finland 52 % (Library statistics Finland 2007). The great majority of fiction loans consist of novels. By fiction I refer to novels. An interest to develop tools for finding fiction has increased recently. Due to the many-layered nature of fiction it is not easy to index its content by the same major principles than non-fiction (Beghtol 1994). Topicality, what the book is about, is the basis for indexing non-fiction. In many cases, it is neither meaningful, nor possible to capture the topic of a literary work of art. It is not meaningful, because readers do not typically read fiction because it’s topic, but how the content of a book is expressed or how it relates their own experience (Waples 1940). It is difficult due to the ambiguity of meaning typical to fiction (Löffler 1978). If readers do not look for fiction based on topic, what are the features they base their searching? The major means of finding fiction are either known-item searches or browsing. Spiller (1980) found that in the UK 54 % of fiction borrowed was based o