Present: P Cohn, G McReynolds, M Szarko, A Perkins, A Locknar (minutes), L Sweeney, A Rostoff

Guests: Nina Davis-Millis, Sands Fish

Announcements/Updates:

  • System-wide instruction plan almost ready! Need a special meeting to talk about it in April, bring to PSLG in May. Try for April 11. Peter will propose on TechTime. 
  • Lisa S has pulled web stats (hits).  Lisa H will help narrow down which URLs (pages) to investigate.   If you have any other thoughts on what pages (exact URLs) to use as comparison, let Lisa S know.  

Instruction Statistics: Nina and Sands Fish visited to talk about how we might improve the way we collect instruction statistics.

  • Welcome to Nina and Sands.
  • In TAG, there was a brainstorming about work processes that could be done better/more efficiently by some technology.  Most popular answer was "forms".  Specifically instruction stats.  Sands does application/web programming, so he'd work on this.   Maggie sent description of how it's handled now.   They agree that is isn't an optimal workflow.
  • What is there about the process that is broken?  
    • Amount of work done after a form is submitted.  
    • Fixing errors in reporting on the form.  Double checking that it's accurate.  Making this easier for the person reporting it.
    • Reports - the report is so huge.  A little hard to manage.
    • Instruction coordinators do different things with the reports, so it needs to be flexible.
    • Would BrioQuery be an option?
    • Create an interface that is user friendly, but so you can access the data too.
  • Are there additional data elements that we'd want to include?  Let Sands know asap. (Peter will email Sands the URL for the form)
  • Include a Notes field?  Just in case?  Include things like problems booking/scheduling DIRC so we can track it?  Maybe make this a radio button (dirc, not in dirc by choice, not in dirc because booked)
  • Have the user see all entries that are in the database, so they can check and make sure there are no duplicates?  Maybe sort this by certain criteria, like date, library, etc?
  • What do we want to capture?  What do we want to search or sort by?  What elements do we want that aren't on the form?      What kind of reports do we want to get?  Want to make sure we can download reports if needed.
  • Are there things we don't have that we wish we had? - For now, just comments field?  We can get back to Sands with this.
  • What about Reference/Desk stats? - done on paper, sent to director's office who enters it into excel.   Need clear decisions of what we want BEFORE this process.  What data we want, what the front end should look like, etc.   Looking into DeskTracker as an option.  If this works, that would be a great option.    If we do go with Sands, it would need to be fairly uniform.  Peter will send testing URL and info to Nina and Sands.   (Peter and Lisa H are following up with DeskTracker.)
  • See if DeskTracker can handle Instruction Stats asap.  Let Sands know.  If we don't want to use it for instruction, Sands can get started on instruction form.
  • Lisa S asked about data gathering (useage stats) for the GIS lab.  Sands will follow up.
  • Who will handle instruction stats for this year? Lisa H expressed interest, Alan would like to help too.  Peter will check with Lisa.

IAP: How we can improve coordination and promotion. (Follow up from Peter, Angie and Alex meeting to discuss this.)

  • Alex Caracuzzo stepped in as IAP coordinator after Jen left.   Angie, Peter and Alex met and talked about it.
  • Proposal instead of having one coordinator, have an IAP task force instead.  Group agreed.
  • Alex is also following up with IAP office about other things like categories on the IAP form.

Next agenda items:

  • Bibliographic management
  • Statistics (ref and instruction) update
  • Web pages (virtual ref, public instruction pages)
  • Web presence for RISG
  • Assessment update (May meeting)
  • System-wide instruction plan review
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