Hello,

We run the catalogs for the State University Libraries of Florida. All eleven have the browse by author and title feature (among other sequential indexes). Here is a snapshot for today's usage (since 4am, combining all eleven universities) from the Apache logs:

Browse Author
30

Browse Title
276

Keyword
9437

This is for approximately 7500 unique sessions. That gives you an idea of a daily proportion. More search and patron feature use statistics can be found here:

http://fclaweb.fcla.edu/mango (Our catalogs are powered by Mango.)


- Josh





Joshua Greben
Systems Librarian/Analyst
Florida Center for Library Automation
5830 NW 39th Ave, Gainesville, FL 32606
[log in to unmask]
352-392-9020 ext 246

On May 3, 2010, at 2:08 PM, Bill Dueber wrote:

> 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
>