IM reference stats–how you keeping ‘em?
August 31, 2005
Sherri Vokey at UNLV is keeping IM Reference stats in a nice MySQL database. She has a tutorial showing how it works. And she’d like to hear from other libraries about how you are keeping IM Reference stats.
Us? Post-it, pen, and hash-marks. I’ve always found limited value in knowledge bases, and this simple method seems to be working well for us. I have a hard time seeing myself asking our already-overworked staff to spend a minute or two after each IM question entering data about the transaction into a database.
September 7th, 2005 at 3:53 pm
Does your library take these statistics on every IM transaction? I was IMing with Bill Drew the other day about this topic, and he mentioned that they only take statistics during certain times of the year.
September 8th, 2005 at 11:37 am
We do keep stats for every IM transaction. For all of our reference work, we keep stats each and every day, so it made sense to keep the same rules for IM reference.