DATA-DRIVEN DECISION-MAKING GETTING STARTED WITH REFERENCE TRACKING SYSTEMS & DATA ANALYTICS

摘要

How using reference statistics can help us better understand our users, staff, and organizations. We both started as research librarians at the University of California Los Angeles Law Library more than 20 years ago. Back then, we tracked reference desk requests each day with tick marks on a sheet of paper. We refer to this now as "data gathering for dummies." While this simple method recorded the number of requests in a given time period, it provided almost zero value (how often do tick marks ever get aggregated?), and we lost the most useful information, such as the questions and the answers.