By asking social scientists and pure scientists/technologists how they learned about the existence of books, it was found that for social scientists the library and for pure scientists/technologists the selective dissemination of promotional materials and books by publishers and booksellers directly to researchers were the principal alerting agents. An analysis of first use versus age revealed that the interest potential of a book is dependent upon several parameters: first, user community, viz. scientific field; second, actuality, i.e. recently published books show a high immediacy effect in their use; third, obsolescence: the rate of decay is dependent on source age.
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