Question

Brief overview of historical browse statistics.

Answer

The Voyager system keeps a count of browses. It counts a browse when an item that is not charged out is discharged. If your library routinely discharges items found off the shelf, the browse counts give you an indication of the in-house use of your materials. This is especially valuable for non-circulating collections such as periodicals. 

Before Voyager 9.0 the system did not record the date when the browse was done.  

Starting with Voyager 9.0 a setting in System Administration allows the retention of historical browse transaction data.  See: Do browse discharge transactions include timestamp when opt to retain browse transactions?

The browse counts are incremented when a circulation staff member scans in an item that has not been charged but merely left on the table. Scanning it in increments a counter in the item record. This is automatic. So the count is the total number of times the item has been discharged without a current charge transaction. You can read more about this in the Circulation User's Guide, Table 5-6.

This information is stored in the Item record.  Data are stored in the EVENT table and the ITEM table.  There are two queries included in Prepackaged Access Reports that can be run to look at historical browse data:

1. Items Browsed
2. Items Browses by Location within Date Range

Additional Information

"Update Shelving Status" (Circjob 1) is a batch job that many libraries run daily.  It updates the shelving status of browse discharged items from discharged to not charged depending on the shelving interval for the item's location.

• Article last edited: 02-Feb-2020