Search Strategies Used by Fiction Readers with Emphasis on Usage of the Online Public Access Catalog: A Survey of Wake County Public Library Patrons

Research in fiction librarianship has led to improvement in how fiction is classified and organized for use in the public library. While advances have been made in understanding how patrons search for fiction within the public library, little research has been done in the setting of the modern online public access catalog. This study describes a questionnaire survey of public library patrons in the five regional libraries of the Wake County Public Library system in North Carolina. The survey was conducted to evaluate how fiction readers select fiction, to what extent they use the online catalog, and how the online catalog could be improved to better suit fiction readers' needs