Analysis of the structure and evolution of the co-borrowing network in Peking University library

In a university library, students from different backgrounds are connected by borrowing the same books, and the co-borrowing relationship forms a knowledge sharing network for books are carriers of knowledge. Studying the structural properties helps us understand the knowledge sharing behaviors among students. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the structural properties and how the properties evolve over time of the co-borrowing network in Peking University library. We find out that the co-borrowing network presents common features of social network including power-law degree distribution, a giant component, small diameter and high clustering. By the temporal analysis, we find out that the power law exponential parameter γ, the diameter and the number of connected components decline over time, and the size of second largest connected component exhibits stabilization after the first few months. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to analyze the temporal properties of the co-borrowing network.