Here is an update on the use of the KU Libraries’ online catalog. The following are the number of searches each fiscal year since the Voyager catalog came up on Friday the 13th of August, 1999:
FY2000 (10 ∏ months) 2,022,858
FY2001 2,318,257
FY2002 2,082,674
FY2003 2,743,737
FY2004 2,411,738
FY2005 2,223,239
FY2006 2,104,846
FY2007 2,153,400
FY2008 2,029,587
There are a couple extenuating circumstances: (1) some search categories were blanked out during an upgrade in December, 2000, so the FY2001 figure is slightly deflated; and (2) during late FY2002 and during FY2003, there was a separate ejounals catalog (rather than their being integrated into the main OPAC) that produced 128,723 searches in FY2002 and 586,227 in FY2003;
The grand total so far thus is 20,090,336 searches in 8 years, 10 ∏ months (plus some of the missing ones from the 2000 upgrade). The current year’s total is about 74% of the highest year (FY2003), but not much different from FY2002 and the past three years have been fairly consistent. There seems to be a very gradual downward trend overall, but even competing with the multitude of databases and other resources that we have added in the past 8 years, catalog use still seems fairly strong.
As historical perspective, back in calendar 1988, the full first year of our first online catalog (pre-Voyager), there were approximately half as many searches. But the catalog database then contained only about 500,000 bibliographic records and did not yet include serial holdings. It now contains well over 3.3 million bib records of all types and full serial holdings.
One added item that might be of interest. Of the 20+ million searches, the most frequent, in terms of percentage of all searches, have been the following:
Keyword 30.80 % (combo of Keyword Relevance + Keyword Boolean)
Title 25.54 %
Journal Title 14.53 %
Author 12.10 %
Subject 6.60 %
Call Number 2.52 %
ISSN 2.14 %
Title keyword 1.47 %
Author keyword 1.10 %
All others are under 1 %.
As a clarification, these statistics are only for searches performed within the online catalog, not those within the other Voyager modules. Going along with the 20+ million OPAC searches are 427,630 searches within the acq/serials module, 515,248 within the circ module, and 5,401,985 within the cataloging module.
