Retrievable but Unencountered: The Missing Exposure Denominator in Large Academic Ebook Collections

Abstract

Academic libraries hold ebook collections so large that no reader can inspect more than a negligible fraction of the catalogue. Assessment of those collections rests almost entirely on usage telemetry. A title that generates no recorded interaction is treated as a title nobody wanted. That inference is unavailable on the present evidence. We separate two constructs the literature conflates: retrievability, the probability that a system returns an item to a query that already specifies it, and encounterability, the probability that an item enters a reader's attention without prior title-level intent. Following a stated protocol over work published from 2018 onward, we find three things. Large zero-use populations are robustly documented. Usage depends heavily on the measuring instrument. And no standard library metric records an item impression. The consequence is an identification problem. Recorded non-use mixes non-exposure, unnoticed exposure, rejection, and off-channel use, and no study located under our protocol decomposes it. Recommender-system research already names this problem: there, feedback is missing not at random. We close with four measurement directions that would narrow the gap without closing it.