Here are some stats from Cal State San Marcos for the past 6 1/2 years (2003-10) . All searches other than keyword are browse searches. keyword = 596,111 title = 158,761 author = 59,293 subject = 23,692 call number = 9,477 form / genre = 4,838 other numbers = 14,636 So: keyword = 596,111 browse = 270,697 These stats only tracked searches that were performed from the catalog home page [1] or that of the library website [2]. Any subsequent searches performed inside the catalog itself are not counted here. I'm not sure if this is really showing that a browse display is popular here, though. I suspect a good number of users (other than librarians) were expecting the title and author searches to behave like the keyword search. But those options are browse searches, so they generate hits in favor of the browse. --Dave [1] http://library.csusm.edu/catalog/ [2] http://biblio.csusm.edu/ ================== David Walker Library Web Services Manager California State University http://xerxes.calstate.edu ________________________________________ From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bill Dueber [[log in to unmask]] Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 11:08 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [CODE4LIB] A call for your OPAC (or other system) statistics! (Browse interfaces) 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