OPAC stats presented so quickly there’s no time for snark on #code4lib

Bill Dueber, University of Michigan

But does anyone use it?

Note – lots

of stuff i

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nter’s notes.

Don’t miss

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NEW!!NOW

FEATURING ACCURATE

DATA!

NEW!!NOW

FEATURING ACCURATE

DATA!

Why did the numbers change?HathiTrust and Mirlyn share a

common code base and Solr backend

I was incorrectly logging HT search events and (correctly) ignoring all other HT activity

…so the apparent number of single-search sessions was grossly inflated

NEW SLIDE!!

NEW SLIDE!!

tl;drRelevancy ranking is incredibly important.

Everything else is ignored by almost everyone.

The argument for statistics (as opposed to just asking the Reference Librarians)

People who use your stuff

People who use your stuff

Associated with your

school

Associated with your

school

People who use your stuff

Associated with your

school

Associated with your

school

Actually enter a library

Actually enter a library

People who use your stuff

Associated with your

school

Associated with your

school

People who actually talk to a librarian

Reference librarians only know about patrons that talk to reference librarians.

Those people are self-selected freaks who shouldn’t drive our development priorities.

1.

2.

Search Results

Record View

Our statistical universeRoughly 750K sessions with searches in 2010

Throw out sessions from known staff IP addressesBecause, really, talk about self-selected freaks…

Get 724K sessions, 1.67M searchesW

RONG

Our statistical universeRoughly 500K sessions with searches in 2010

Throw out sessions from known staff IP addressesBecause, really, talk about self-selected freaks…

Get 485K sessions, 1.5M searches (avg. 3.1 searches/session)

First wake-up call

45% of all sessions have exactly one action: a search

WRONG

First wake-up call

17% of all sessions have exactly one action: a search

Corollary one

Only 17% of all sessions involve someone seeing the Record View12% of those (2 percentage points) are

from “See Holdings”WRONG

Corollary one

In only 28% of all sessions does the user see the Record View

In only 37% of sessions does a user interact with a specific record (either by doing something to get to the Record View or clicking on an eLink for fulltext.)

Are they writing down call numbers? Having failed searches?

Second wake-up call

Anything not at the top of the screen is ignored

Place in result set of records touched

Result Percent Cumulative

1 40% 40%

2 12% 52%

3 7% 59%

4 4% 63%

5 3% 66%WRONG

Place in result set of records touched

Result Percent Cumulative

1 44% 44%

2 14% 58%

3 7% 65%

4 5% 70%

5 3% 73%

6 3 76%

What does that mean?

People do a lot of known-item searches

and/or people really, really trust your relevancy ranking

Make sure your relevancy ranking is really, really good.

Percentage of sessions that…Use a facet: 4%Use a canned search (e.g. author or subject link): 2.6%

Export records/search: 1.3%Prev/Next/Back: 0.8%

WRONG

Percentage of sessions that…Use a facet: 7%Use a canned search (e.g. author or subject link): 4%

Export records/search: 2%Prev/Next/Back: 1.4%

If you’re interested

I’ll strip identifiers out of the data and provide an sqlite3 database after the conference

…once authority to do so has been debated and eventually granted by the correct set of committees and subcommittees.

Bill Dueber bill@dueber.com