Wednesday, June 16

Statistics and archives with Irene today. Irene has the title of library associate. She is a delightful woman from Russia who graciously shares her office with me. Irene takes care of many of the clerical tasks necessary in a busy library, as well as being the back-up -- taking care of the desk when Tillie is away, sitting in the Community Health Library when Christine needs to be away, answering the phone, assisting patrons, etc. She takes part in the cataloging process, gathers statistics into excel sheets, and works on archives. Today she took time out of her busy schedule to talk about statistics and archives.
Each member of the library staff has a monthly "time tracking form" customized to their particular postion. An informationist will log how much time was spent doing searches as well as how many searches were done, for instance. At the end of the month, Irene will combine these stats. There are other statistics to be logged -- number of class participants, # of reference questions, items cataloged, circulation records, library patron walk-ins, etc. A yearly summary of these is compiled and a five year record is maintained to easily note any major increases or decreases in an area. These statistics do NOT have to be shared with administration.
Archives: A quick note here about a Bayview medical center archive project that has begun here in the fall of 2009. Hard copy archival items are being filed by topic and moved into electronic format using Archon developed at the University of Illinois, (Archon is award-winning software for archivists and manuscript curators. It automatically publishes archival descriptive information and digital archival objects in a user-friendly website.)
In addition, Irene showed me the "classical book collection" (that I did not mention in my earlier blog about the books in the library). These are historical books kept in a locked glass cabinet. They DO circulate. I was also very impressed by a collection of books prepared by the library staff that focus on an individual (or in one case, a couple) Bayview doctor. There is, for instance, a 5 volume set of Harrison Works, containing information about and the papers of Harold E. Harrison, the doctor for which the library was named.

Camtasia: One more note for today -- I spent just a little time with Christine who is working on preparing some online tutorials to put on the library website using Camtasia http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp.