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Re: Statistics (was RE: WA STATE LIBRARY)



Other stats might include:

Time taken to fill request
        Compare agency requests and public
Track type of request against:
        Time of year
        Election cycle
        budget cycle

Processing man hours
        Photo
        Text
        Video
        Audio

Track exit interview results

Just a thought or two

Chris Flynn CA CRM

 -----Original Message-----
From:   Peter Kurilecz [mailto:pakurilecz@AOL.COM]
Sent:   Tuesday, February 05, 2002 12:31 PM
To:     ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject:        Re: Statistics (was RE: WA STATE LIBRARY)

On Tue, 5 Feb 2002 14:52:46 -0500, Daniel Sokolow <DSokolow@NSHS.EDU> wrote:

>Peter's response made me think of something (other than the much-maligned
>genealogists, who probably are our best and most passionate advocates).
>Maintaining statistics is probably something we haven't talked about much
>and should be a cornerstone of our archival work.

One must be very careful when setting up the information you want to
collect. Just reporting straight numbers doesn't mean anything. You must
correlate them to something. Otherwise you are only providing a factoid.

Here is a short list (off the top of my head) of some types of statistical
information.

Items pulled - how many books, folders, boxes pulled per day.

Researchers - how many per day, how long per day (purchase an automatic date
stamper clock'em in, clock'em out. Don't have to do it every day, but you
may in the beginning to have valid data), where are they from? (keep track
of their zip codes)when did they arrive ie what part of the day? (helps with
staffing schedules)

Processing - how long, how much, how much more time to completion.

Institutional requests - research requests for your organization so how
long, what was the result, what departments

Outside activities ie PR work speeches given, exhibits designed.


But be careful. Once you started reporting statistical data you will be
asked to compare to past years, don't get locked in to reporting only one
way and no don't be creative.

The information can be reported both as mean and median (look'em up)

once you start it can be fun, carry around a small index card with your
recent stats, if someone asks "how are things?" you can answer great! Our
number of researchers is up compared to last year at this time. We are
serving more researchers from x area, processing is moving along and we gave
5 speeches last week to a total of x number of folks.

Don't bore them, dazzle them. So when it comes to budget time you have the
ammunition, oh! and you want more support? How about establishing a Yahoo!
Group for your researchers. use it as a means to give them updates via email
on your institution. It is 'free' (advertising makes it free), but it is
easy to set up and to run. (http://groups.yahoo.com)

PeterK

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A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
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Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>