I wrote this post for my library’s blog to talk about one aspect of my work with digital archives for the Day of Digital Archives.
Take a look! And then don’t yell at me cause I should have already finished migrating the blog to Drupal. “Finish migrating something to Drupal” is the story of my life.
I gave this talk in March of this year, and the video was just posted.
Using the READ Scale to Track the Effort of Resolving Electronic Resource Access Issues from ER&L on Vimeo.
When a patron has a problem with an electronic resource, what does he do? There are a few possibilities, and depending on where you work, one might be more likely than another. Maybe he visits the website that explains what to do. Maybe he contacts a librarian. Maybe he contacts the IT help desk (which I recently discovered is often what people do where I work). The experience in each case is different, but ultimately we want the patron to get his issue resolved in a timely fashion with a high level of satisfaction. Plus we would like to get some information for the future to improve the system or documentation.
At both Electronic Resources in Libraries and ACRL, I talked about my work trying to adapt the READ Scale to measuring the difficulty of electronic resource access issues. Basically this has taken the form of adding the READ Scale to a simple ticketing system, and then monitoring what types of questions I was spending my time answering. I want to make it easy for all the staff at the library to answer the lowest level questions, so that I can spend more of my time getting the highest level systems working well.
Slides from ER in L are posted below. They are also posted on Dominican’s institutional repository, but speaking of high level systems that need to work better… well, not the best for embedding automatically in blogs. You might also want to consult my handout for ACRL, which is rather similar to the ER in L handout but is online on someone else’s server, so why put it on any of mine?
If you want to know more about any of this, do get in touch with me. I am looking for potential research study participants.