Hello everyone. I am pleased to announce that our poster "Using What You Already Collect: Library Data and Student Success" won a "Judges' Choice" award and the "People's Choice" award at the 2012 Library Assessment Conference. If you are interested you can check out the poster here:
Using What You Already Collect: Library Data and Student Success
Please let us know if you have any questions about it! Thanks to the judges and attendees at the Library Assessment Conference!
I found your LAC 2012 poster to be a very useful model to adapt to our context. I have a question about an aspect of your methods though. Specifically, how you define "Internet IDs", and what software did you use to track/gather them? Are you happy enough with the software to recommend its use to others?
Thanks!
Eric Ackermann
BTW, congratulations on your "Judges Choice" award!
Eric, my apologies on the lateness of this response! Internet IDs are institutionally generated. Essentially everyone gets one that becomes there email address. My Internet ID is "snackeru" and my U of M email address is "snackeru@umn.edu". Hopefully that makes sense.
The software we used to gather them depends on the access point we are tracking. For most electronic based resources we created click-thru links that stuff records into a MySQL database. For online reference resources we used data from OCLC's QuestionPoint. For circulation records we extracted records from our Aleph catalog. For more information, check out the article "Analyzing Demographics" that I just posted: http://z.umn.edu/analyzingdemo
That article gets into much more detail regarding the data gathering methods we used. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Shane