FY00 HOLLIS Catalog Use

Every year OIS produces an analysis of the use of the HOLLIS public catalog, giving counts for various kinds of activity. This is a rather complex document, requiring detailed knowledge of the system to interpret correctly. Instead of circulating the full report OIS has compiled the following summary of a few of the more interesting statistics:

• There were 6.3 million searches performed last year. Of those searches:

  31% were author searches
  39% were title searches
  10% were subject searches
  16% were keyword searches

  The remaining 4% of the searches were call numbers, ISBN searches, etc. Twenty-four per cent of all searches found no match (one suspects a lot of spelling and keying errors...). Only 2% of the searches were "qualified" (by language, date, format, library, etc.).

  • Twelve million bibliographic records were displayed. Circulation status for these titles was requested 1.9 million times, and detailed holdings information 377 thousand times. For the citation databases in HOLLIS, local holdings information was requested 144 thousand times.
  • Users requested help from the system 253 thousand times, and were given "automatic" help (e.g., when a patron got more hits on a search than HOLLIS will display) 24thousand times.
  • One thousand "comments" were sent to the library through HOLLIS.
  • 114 thousand books were requested through HOLLIS from HD or to be delivered from a Harvard library (GET and GET ANY).
  • HOLLIS databases were used as follows (count of sessions initiated)

  Union catalog	1,838,584
  Library Guide	50,240
  Anthropological Lit	14,219
  Course Reserves	129,360

  If you are interested in obtaining the full report, please contact OIS.