The second session this afternoon concluded with a great discussion about how to leverage the statistics we gather to inform decisions we make related to collection development, processing priorities and storage.
Ben Primer from Princeton explained that he used data to determine which collections hadn’t been used in 5 years and then sent those manuscript collections to off site storage. Sarah Keen from Colgate shared that she has moved several University archives collections to their remote storage (although that site is within the footprint of the library itself).
As a member of an ARL institution, my department has to record certain statistics. We use the sampling method to generate the annual total of reference questions, number of public presentations, which include those given by staff to classes and community groups.
However, like many organizations, we don’t extrapolate action items from the data. We could use it to determine processing priorities, or in our assessment of space constraints. Perhaps more immediate, are what we don’t collect.
The statistics we gather also don’t take into account the move into digital. We aren’t compelled to count website hits, scan downloads or uploads of digitized content.
How are other institutions handling this gap in data gathering?