FY97 HOLLIS Catalog Use

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Last revised: 10/31/97

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 8.2 million searches performed last year. Of those searches:

32% were author searches
36% were title searches
16% were subject searches
13% were keyword searches

The remaining 3% of the searches were call numbers, ISBN searches, etc. A full twenty-five per cent of all searches found no match (one suspects a lot of spelling and keying errors...). Only 2.1% of the searches were "qualified" (by language, date, format, library, etc.).

Twenty-one million bibliographic records were displayed. Circulation status for these titles was requested 1.7 million times, and detailed holdings information 450 thousand times. For the citation databases in HOLLIS, local holdings information was requested 380 thousand times.
Users requested help from the system 76 thousand times, and were given "automatic" help (e.g., when a patron got more hits on a search than HOLLIS will display) 200 thousand times.
Users downloaded (via e-mail) 101 thousand sets of bibliographic records, with an average of 7.5 titles per set.
Sixteen hundred "comments" were sent to the library through HOLLIS.
Ninety-eight 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	1,560,000
Academic Index	138,000
Course reserves	99,000
Library Guide	63,000
ERIC	46,000
Old Widener	24,000
PsychInfo	35,000
Legal Resources	25,000
Anthropological Lit	19,000
PAIS	15,000
Religion Index	13,000
RISM	7,000
Physics Preprints	3,000

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