Circulation and Search Numbers

In the first half of April, 60% of all renewals and 60% of all holds were placed from outside the library, by library users logged into their records.

About 40% of all catalog searches were done from outside the library. If you judge by the number of searches which yield no hits (what the statistics program calls 'search with no direct retrievals'), remote users have slightly better luck at constructing searches that find them Something. We try not to look very closely very often at the lists of 'no direct retrievals' searches; it's too late, the people are gone, we can't help them find what it looks like they wanted... Still, there are always interesting things to be learned about what people want. By far the most frequent title searches in the past 40 days were series of kids books: American Girl, The Zack Files, Wishbone, Scary Stories... For stand-alone titles, the most frequent searches were Hoot, Mindfulness in Plain English, Infidel, and Blood and Thunder. And the most frequent subject search in the same period was quilts.