FY99 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 6.4 million searches performed last year. Of those searches:

  29% were author searches
  34% were title searches
  22% were subject searches
  12% were keyword searches

  The remaining 3% of the searches were call numbers, ISBN searches, etc. Twenty two 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.).

  • Fifteen million bibliographic records were displayed. Circulation status for these titles was requested 1.7 million times, and detailed holdings information 355 thousand times. For the citation databases in HOLLIS, local holdings information was requested 190 thousand times.
  • Users requested help from the system 46 thousand times, and were given "automatic" help (e.g., when a patron got more hits on a search than HOLLIS will display) 127 thousand times.
  • Twelve hundred "comments" were sent to the library through HOLLIS.
  • 94 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	1,450,000
  Academic Index	16,178
  Course reserves	109,000
  Library Guide	60,000
  ERIC	4,500
  Old Widener	2,600
  PsychInfo	900
  Legal Resources	24,000
  Anthropological Lit	18,000
  PAIS	1,200
  Religion Index	4,600
  RISM	3,700
  Physics Preprints	2,000

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