Indianapolis Star's Star Reference Library Log: New Entry

A blank form in the Indianapolis Star's Reference Library Log

According to Michael Jesse of the Indianapolis Star, this snapshot shows what the form looks like when first opened. The date and the librarian name are automatically filled in. There are pulldown selections for the time range (as in 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.) and the day of the week (so they can run stats showing reference activity byday of the week or time of day). The "Requester" is the name of the person who called and, since this form is built onto their e-mail system, you can use a pulldown to select the name from the e-mail directory. You can also type it in but that tends to cause trouble later when you try to search by reporter's name. The default of the Status field is "answered" since we assume that 98 percent of the calls will indeed be answered in short order. But sometimes we can't come up with an answer and it would be useful to review those situations to figure out why we could not answer them. There is an open text area where the librarian canwrite the question asked. "Number of requests" is set to one, but we do sometimes have reporters who will make one phone call and then give you a laundry list of several things they want. In order to count this as what it is, we have the option of making the number of requests something else, if that is appropriate. The checkboxes are for resources used in answering the question and there is a comment area at the bottom where -- if appropriate -- we can comment on some problem or suggestion with the sources used. In the "log completed" shapshot you can see how this gets filled in.

The Indianapolis Star's Star Reference Library Log is based in Lotus Notes.


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Last Updated: 3/18/03
Jessica Baumgart
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