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At NCSU, we don't have any survey or focus group data about user interest in limiting by availability. But we do have an availability limit on our catalog search results page. It's a link at the top of the page that says 'limit results to currently available items'. http://www2.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/?N=0&Nty=1&Ntk=Keyword&view=full&Ntt=deforestation Thought maybe folks would be interested in our stats. I'm generalizing a bit with these figures, but I think they give a feel for usage. For the period July - November 2006, we saw approximately 5,746 uses of the limit to available functionality. If you compare that with total use of our various facets (including our 'new book' facet), that's out of 352,292 (about 1.6%). It's actually our least used facet (*gasp*). In that time period, we also processed about 538,283 search requests. So maybe just under 1.1% of search requests used an availability limit. Of course, like any statistic, interpreting it is fraught with danger. Do people not use it b/c it's too small? Would it be more useful if it was placed elsewhere on the screen? Would folks use it less if it wasn't at the top? What if we changed the wording? The problem we always face with this type of statistics is: what the heck to do with those numbers? -emily lynema Steve Toub wrote: > Jonathan Rochkind wrote: > >> Patrons definitly want to be able to limit on availability. And I don't >> think anyone's figured out a good way to do that in this generation of >> "export and index" search tools we are experimenting with. > > > Does anyone have hard data (e.g., surveys, focus groups... anything more > than anecdotes) on this? > --SET -- Emily Lynema Systems Librarian for Digital Projects Information Technology, NCSU Libraries 919-513-8031 [log in to unmask]