Patron Searches in Web Management Reports

[Elizabeth Thomsen <et@xxxxxxxxxx>]

We are having a problem with analyzing patron searches in Web Management
Reports.  The list of subjects in order of popularity gives incorrect
and confusing results.  What seems to be happening is that a longer,
phrase search (for example, "gardening roses") and other, shorter
searches ("gardening") are being counted as if they were the same
search, and it's the longer version that's being given "credit" for the
searches.  So our report indicates that our most popular subject
searches report looks like this:

computers in schools	30
gardening roses    	25
poetry written by women	20

when the truth is that "computers" was searched 30 times and "computers
in schools" was searched once.  We've noticed that in the alphabetical
list of searches, phrases sort before single words (gardening roses
before gardening) which may be related.

The result is that these reports are extremely misleading-- especially
since the single word "sex" is always among our top ten searches, and
we're getting reports of some strange variations on a theme as if they
were searched many times, instead of once.  We reported this to the Help
Desk over a week ago and haven't had a response, and we're wondering if
this is something unique to our system or if these reports are wrong on
all systems.  Our reports in the terminal-based system seem to be
correct, but as a new, Millennium installation our libraries are only
accessing statistics via Web Management Reports.

-- 
Elizabeth Thomsen, Member Services Manager
NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange
Danvers MA 01923
et@xxxxxxxxxx