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G. D. Becker (California Institute of Technology), M. Rauch (Carnegie Observatories), W. L. W. Sargent (California Institute of Technology)
Determining the metallicity of the IGM at various redshifts is critical to constraining evolutionary models of large-scale structure. To this end, the O {\small{VI}} 1032, 1038 doublet has proven to be a sensitive tracer of metals in low-column density regions. We present the results of a statistical search for O {\small{VI}} in 28 archival QSO spectra obtained with the moderate-resolution (R = 1300) {\it{HST}} Faint Object Spectrograph. Our results span the redshift range 0.26 to 1.7, wherein the majority of O {\small{VI}} is found in conventionally detected (i.e., strong) absorption features. In addition, we offer a critical assessment of the statistical search method.