Collective behaviors of book holding durations

Duration can directly reflect the collective reading behaviors of library user book holding. In this paper, by introducing the burstiness and memory coefficients, we empirically investigate the collective book holding behavior of three university libraries. The statistical results show that there are similar properties among the students with different backgrounds, presenting the burstiness 〈B〉=−0.2 and memory 〈M〉=0.5 for three datasets, which indicates that memory and random effects coexist in student book holding durations. In addition, we analyze the behavior patterns without duplicate durations by merging a series of books borrowed and returned at the same time. The results show the average burstiness B increases to −0.16 and memory M drops to 0.16 for three datasets, which indicates that both duplicate behavior and student's preference affect the memory effect. Furthermore, we present a model which assumes student's next book holding duration follows the previous one with probability p, and with probability 1−p, the student would hold the book independently. The experimental results show that the presented model can reproduce the burstiness and memory effect of student book holding durations when p=0.5 for empirical datasets and p=0.2 for de-duplicate datasets, which indicate that the student's preferential holding behavior occurs with the probability p. This work helps in deeply understanding the regularity of duration-based human behaviors.