If you have any notes on specifics of what your users like/need about
browse search, they would be very useful to me. We are currently
engaging in that exersize of "determine what those things are, and then
figure out if we can achieve them through methods other than browse search."
Jonathan
Tod Olson wrote:
Bill,
Here are relative percentages for our Horizon catalog, based on our 2008-2009
annual report:
Browse Searches 76.2%
Keyword Searches 20.9%
Mulit-index Searches 2.9%
That interface presents a browse search box before a keyword search box, so
browses are encouraged by the UI.
That said, we did a study with our graduate students this year and they rely on browse searches for some of their academic work. One is the use of subject and author browses, which lets the student feel confident that they have been exhaustive in their searching in their area of research. This can possibly be accommodated in other ways.
In addition to known-item searching, our grad students also use title browse to be
confident that we do _not_ own something. In our relevance-ranked interface, sometimes
the scholar may blame relevance ranking for "hiding" a title from them which we
don't actually own. It's an understandable reaction.
-Tod
Tod Olson <t...@uchicago.edu>
Systems Librarian
University of Chicago Library
On May 3, 2010, at 1:08 PM, Bill Dueber wrote:
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
