Eric,

It's not Aleph, but... III's catalog has a "create list" function that lets you create a list of records (bib records, item records, patron records, etc) that meet certain criteria (patrons who live is xxxxx zip code, items in the main stacks with more than 5 checkouts, etc.) 

To do what your friend is trying to do, it would help to have some way of flagging the relevant records (popular lit) -- maybe they are the books in a particular location, or maybe he's added a local subject heading, etc -- something that lets him point to a particular subset of the collection. So his process might look something like:
* find all the books that match:
 - published since 1980
 - location = popular fiction collection
 - total circ > 2
* and then export selected fields:
 - author
 - title
 - publisher
 - year
 - total circs
 - total renews

Or something like that. 
This is exactly the kind of search and extraction that I designed my Weeding Helper tool to work with -- only there I'm looking at *un*-popular materials: 
https://github.com/kenirwin/Weeding-Helper 
Demo: http://www6.wittenberg.edu/lib/iii/weed/demo/view.php?table=art_orders 
It takes that sort of search-and-export data from the catalog and makes it sortable and subject to note-taking so you can take a computer or tablet up to the stacks and weed a range of books and have their circ history in front of you. 

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 5:08 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] circulation statistics

Does anybody here know how to extract circulation statistics from an library catalog? Specifically, given a date range, are you able to create a list of the most frequently borrowed books ordered by the number of times they’ve been circulated?

I have a colleague who wants to digitize sets of modern literature and then do text analysis against the result. In an effort to do the analysis against popular literature, he wants to create a list of… popular titles. Getting a list of such a thing from library circulation statistics sounds like a logical option to me. 

Does somebody here know how to do this? If you know how to do it against Ex Libris’s Aleph, then that is a bonus. 

—
Eric Morgan