Interesting, thanks. I'm curious to know if usage would increase if you
gave an option to limit by availability on the search form, rather than
just from the results page. Though interface clutter has a cognitive cost.
I don't have any answers, but it seems like the decision of whether to
index availability to allow for winnow (NCSU) or pull from real-time on
the results page (FCLA) or something else (pull availability info in
real-time when user shows intent they want to see) has significant
implications on technical architecture and response time.
Also, as a possible sweet-spot, I'm wondering if its practical to do
post-search winnowing by availability after doing the FCLA-style
real-time query, by doing indexing on the fly of the responses from the
real-time queries for that particular search.
--SET
Emily Lynema wrote:
> 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]
>
