Document Type
Presentation
Publication Date
January 2014
Publication Title
California Library Association
Disciplines
Library and Information Science
Abstract
There have been many changes in how libraries are recording and quantifying the work performed at the reference desk. Instead of collecting uninformative hash marks, many libraries have moved towards electronic collection of reference statistics.The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library has begun to collect all reference transactions through the online reference tracking system, Gimlet. These numbers are aggregated and supplied to various agencies to demonstrate library impact.Since the implementation of the online tracking system, a decrease of reference transactions has been noted. This project seeks to shed some light on this topic by comparing a series of in-person observations of the work performed at the desk to the corresponding recorded transactions in the online program.
Recommended Citation
Chan, E. K. (2014, November). Do the statistics match reality? Accuracy of recorded reference transactions at a joint academic/public reference desk. Poster at the California Library Association 2014 Annual Conference, Oakland, CA.
