Reference Renaissance: Beyond the Hash(mark)

The last session I attended at Reference Renaissance had a definite take-home idea for me. Ironically an idea I knew I was taking home since the first morning of the conference, but more about that later.

The presentation was titled, "Beyond the Hash(mark): Tally Sheets are so 2005 with these presenters from Kansas State University (KState):

• Danielle Theiss-White
• Laura Bonella
• Jason Coleman
• Erin Fritch

In addition to the subject matter, this presentation gave me a striking lesson in modern communication culture that stunned me. Attendees were given a choice between asking questions by raising their hand OR by texting a message from their cell phone. This seemed like a needless gimmick to me, BUT five questions were received in this fashion. I don't own a cell phone, but I had borrowed my wife's cell phone for the conference. She doesn't have a texting plan, but even if she did, I feel like I would have spent a half hour composing the text message. Clearly a significant number of people don't share my discomfort. Is this a sign we should be offering SMS ref service at the library? So people can text us from the stacks? Just thinking out loud.

Sorry to be distracted by the shiny new toy of in-room texting, but it seemed worth mentioning.

The meat of the presentation was a "debate" between Danielle, representing
KState with its electronic stat tool for reference, and Jason, representing GraphiteU, an entity eerily similar to KState except for using paper tally sheets.

Danielle sung the praises of the Libstats data gathering tool. Libstats is free and open source and can be found at http://code.google.com/p/libstats/. KState uses it to track reference questions. Types of information gathered are the question and answer itself, location, patron type, question type, time spent, question format (i.e. phone, IM, e-mail, etc) and librarian initials. There are several built-in reports and data can also be exported to any spreadsheet program for further analysis. Multiple librarians can access the program at one time. It looks pretty decent, although code page says that the person who maintains the program is switching jobs and is looking for a new developer to take over. And the user community as represented by the Libstats user group at http://groups.google.com/group/libstats only has 34 members. But it still looked pretty nifty and certainly a cheap way to develop a knowledge base.

Jason sung the praises of the paper tally sheet. He was entertaining but not particularly convincing. Except for noting that his method kept working during internet breakdowns and power outages.

One thing that both "debaters" emphasized is that you should understand WHY you are collecting statistics. Many of us have to keep track for state and/or federal reports, but the right kind of data can help you determine desk staffing and training needs. This is where tracking question content and time of day can be handy. And this is undoubtedly easier in electronic format. If you are creating a knowledge base with questions, it is very important to strip out identifying information as you may get court/national security orders to release material from your tracking database.

It was a fun and informative session. Enough so that I recommend seeing KState librarians whereever they present. They are a fun-loving group who communicate knowledge well.

At the top of this post I mentioned that I had marked electronic reference tracking from the first morning. That's because I stopped by the table of Altarama and asked them to give me a breakfast demo of their DeskStats product. I was impressed and it seemed reasonably priced. It definitely has better reporting than LibStats and I liked the way it could customize sub types of reference questions. It also seems to have the capability of letting other sections of our division have their own specialized question tracking forms. If so, it would free up time of our publications specialist who currently spends a good amount of time compiling spreadsheets of question counts. I also think it will lead to more accurate reporting and allow us to better track our educational opportunities.

The one possible drawback to DeskStats is that I didn't see a way to enter Q&A data like I did for LibStats. So it couldn't double as a knowledgebase. But we blog selected reference questions of interest at our "Since You Asked" blog at http://askasl.blogspot.com/ and as that blog develops, it will become a knowledgebase of sorts.

I've arranged for the vendor to call me and arrange a demonstration DeskStats for my staff and other interested parties. We'll see how things go from there. But I'd really like to get out of the tally sheet/excel grind.

So there you have it, the last of six sessions plus a keynote and an exciting plenary session. There are other sessions I wished I could have gone to also, but one can be in a single place at one time. Wouldn't risk a Hermione style time-turner for them. But I might buy the proceedings, depending on their price and how much I get out of the free powerpoint slides.

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Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you’ve got a different take on the session you’d like to share.