And what about Find it at Cornell?  We are very interested in how many users are clicking on the Find it at Cornell link from a find articles object record, and further, how many are then clicking on the full text when that option is available for a given article.  Since reference linking is a service that users highly value and expect more and more, we anticipated that full text access would be high.

The chart on the left shows you the breakdown between simply clicking on the Find it at Cornell screen and clicking on the full text link for an article.  The red represents how many times users clicked on Find it at Cornell, and the blue represents how many times they went to the full text.  Given the assumption that users want to go to the full text and would click on a link if it were present, the numbers you see here surprised us.

I added the chart on the right for a point of comparison – take a look at the top line, which represents the number of times Find Articles was accessed, week by week.  For example, if we look at week 2 for this chart and compare it to week 2 of the chart on the left, we can surmise that out of about 5,000 sessions where users searched Find Articles, the Find it at Cornell screen was accessed about 1,200 times.  From there, users clicked on roughly 250 full text articles.  Again, it appears users are connecting to full text via Find Articles and Find it at Cornell  a surprisingly small percentage of the time.  At this point, we have only about 35 remote repository connections in Find Articles, whereas Find Databases connects to over 1,000 resources.   Although it is true that not all of the 35 remote repository connections in Find Articles link to full text articles, it is also true that reference linking should allow for a much higher rate of full text access.  Currently, the number of electronic journals in our “knowledge base” in LinkFinder Plus covers about 90% of our total Cornell subscriptions.

These results leave us with some important questions:

Are users selecting and searching more non-full-text rather than resources through Find Articles?  If they are searching full text resources, are they having difficulty recognizing how to connect to the full text?  Currently, we have the full text link showing up at the bottom of the Find it at Cornell page, below our Catalog search options, as is the default display setting in LinkFinder Plus.  We are in the process of moving the link up above the catalog search options so it will be interesting to see if that display order increases the number of connections to full text.  Beyond that, we need to do some user observation to determine how users are navigating Find it At Cornell and whether or not they are missing the links.