I got email from a person today saying, and I quote,

 "I must say that [the lack of a browse interface] come as a shock (*which
interface cannot browse??*)"

[Emphasis mine]

Here, a "browse interface" is one where you can get a giant list of all the
titles/authors/subjects whatever -- a view on the data devoid of any
searching.

Will those of you out there with "browse interfaces" in your system take a
couple minutes to send along a guesstimate of what percentage of patron
sessions involve their use?

[Note that for right now, I'm excluding "type-ahead" search boxes although
there's an obvious and, in my mind, strong argument to be made that they're
substantially similar for many types of data]

We don't have a browse interface on our (VuFind) OPAC right now. But in the
interest of paying it forward, I can tell you that in Mirlyn, our OPAC, has
numbers like this:

Pct of Mirlyn sessions, Feb/March/April 2010, which included at least one
basic
search and also:

  Go to full record view      46% (we put a lot of info in search results)
  Select/"favorite" an item   15%
  Add a facet:                13%
  Export record(s)
   to email/refworks/RIS/etc. 3.4%
  Send to phone (sms)         0.21%
  Click on faq/help/AskUs
     in footer                0.17%  (324 total)

Based on 187,784 sessions, 2010.02.01 to 2010.04.31

So...anyone out there able to tell me anything about browse interfaces?

-- 
Bill Dueber
Library Systems Programmer
University of Michigan Library