Bill Drew writes \”I just discovered and reported to OCLC a very critical error in the reports generated for FirstSearch Usage statistics. The tech support contact told me that they are aware of it and have been for some time. It is fixed with reports after this Month. They are unable (or unwilling) to fix it for statistics generated before that date. What I found was in doing the Searches Used report where individual databases are used, if a database was not used for the month I selected to generate the report on it does not appear in the report at all.
More….
Bill Drew writes \”I just discovered and reported to OCLC a very critical error in the reports generated for FirstSearch Usage statistics. The tech support contact told me that they are aware of it and have been for some time. It is fixed with reports after this Month. They are unable (or unwilling) to fix it for statistics generated before that date. What I found was in doing the Searches Used report where individual databases are used, if a database was not used for the month I selected to generate the report on it does not appear in the report at all.
More….For example if I generate a report for August 2001 and we did not access Agricola that month it will not show up in any other months listed on that report. That would mean if we used Agricola in June 2001 it still would not show up in the report for August 2001. I was comparing totals from different reports and getting very weird numbers.
I personally feel that notice of this bug should been in the newsletters sent out to everyone by OCLC. It means that statistics I have reported in the past for detailed database use on FirstSearch were wrong. now I feel like a fool since our database usage really varies month by month depending on assignments given out here by faculty. Please feel free to forward this message.
Wilfred (Bill) Drew
Associate Librarian, Systems and Reference
SUNY Morrisville College Library
E-mail: mailto:[email protected]
billdrew.net
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