Best Practices - Statistics

Statistics -- The Role of Policies in Alexandria Statistics

Perhaps you have never paid much attention to the statistics that Alexandria can provide for you or you have felt that your needs have been quite satisfied by the barest basic statistical data such as number of items checked out for the week, month, or year.  We would like to pose a few thought-provoking questions for you to consider:

• What role do statistics play in your library situation? 

• Do you ever refer to the statistical data that Alexandria gathers for you? 

• Would more detailed statistics be beneficial to you and how?

• Is there a way to achieve very detailed statistical data?

Statistical Reports

Alexandria has many statistical report options available.  The Super Summary details an amazing amount of statistical data about your collection -- number of titles and copies, value, number or lost and discarded copies, collection age, and collection usage -- by call number, item policy, and medium.  Other reports will show the number of items checked out, renewed, checked in and the number of holds placed by a certain time period.  All these are extremely useful statistics; however, there is a little-used and even less-understood feature of Alexandria that provides statistics based upon a combination of patron and item policies.

Using patron and item policies combined to generate statistical data will empower you to view your collection and users with new eyes.  For instance, a circulation of 2015 items for the month may sound very impressive, but if you were able to compare the usage by one grade to another grade, you might be surprised by the results.  Further, if you were to look at the usage of one patron group compared to another in a particular area of your library collection, could also be very informative.  For instance, if you used a combination of patron and item policies to see how many biographies were being checked out by eighth graders since a biography unit is part of their core curriculum and you discover that absolutely no eighth graders had checked out biographies and the school year is nearly ended -- what could you do?  You might report your findings to the principal since this is definitely a case of the core curriculum not being followed.  You could be very pro-active and offer to book talk biographies to the English classes and, perhaps, provide a unique book report activity that would be fun and exciting for the students to do.  You might take a very close look at your biographies to determine if the reading level is too low, too high or are they very outdated so the students would not even recognize the names of many of the people whose biographies you have.

Setting Policies to Achieve Meaningful Statistics

Alexandria comes with two patron policies -- Standard Patron and System Patron -- and two item policies -- Standard Item and System Item.  System Patrons and System Items are used for those things that Alexandria sets such as Lost Copies Patron, Discarded Copies Patron. 

Most users will establish other policies.  Generally, these have been kept very simple such as Student and Teachers or Book and Reference.  Let's look at how we can make these policies provide more meaningful statistics.

To achieve greater detail in your statistics, we suggest a policy for each specific group of patrons that you wish to follow.  In a school, this might be a policy for each grade or even a grade/gender (6th Grade Girls); however,  a public library might want to follow users from a geographical area and/or age (Norton Twp, Norton Twp Adults, or Children).  Even if the privileges of the group are the same as other groups, still make policies that are going to identify the patron groups you wish to follow.  With more detail-specific policies, you can now see how many items are being checked out by each of these patron groups, but let's take that a bit further and get more detail in your item policies.

In the past, perhaps, you have set your item policies to general groups based upon the length of the checkout period -- books for two weeks, reference with no circulation, AV for one week, etc.  But let's break this down a bit more.  True, you could have a Fiction and a Non-Fiction policy instead, but consider being even more detailed in setting your policies -- instead of Non-Fiction, think of the benefits of having a 000s policy, a 100s policy, a 200s policy, etc. 

Now, your statistics become very useful.  Look at the report below which shows usage by Item/Patron policy combinations. 

The abbreviations S03, S06, S07, etc. represent Students-3rd Grade, Students-4th Grade, Students-7th Grade, etc.  SYS is System patrons (or items) and STD is Standard patron or Standard item. The Item policies FIC, NF, E, AV, etc. are easily understood. It is quite easy to see who is using what parts of the library and when; however, the two largest statistics are essentially mystery statistics -- 12 Standard items checked out by Seventh Graders and 13 Standard Items checked out by Starndard Patrons.  What is a Standard item and who is a Standard patron?  Totally useless when compared to the other statistics!  Think how much more valuable these statistics could be if NF was divided by the major divisions of the Dewey Decimal system!

NOTE:  Central Union libraries need to realize that Policies are GLOBAL, so that means that everyone needs to "buy in" to making the changes especially for Item policies since Call Number Mapping might become useless if you do not keep things standard.  For instance, if you have a fiction policy that is different for each school, Call Number Mapping will not know which fiction policy to use for items that have call numbers beginning with FIC!  This could lead to a great deal of extra work every time you import items.

Making New Patron and Item Policies Easily

If you are convinced that more detailed Patron policies are the way to go, these are the steps to follow:

1. Go to Edit on the menu bar and select Preferences from the drop-down menu.

2. Change the first drop-down menu at the top-left of the Preferences window to b and the second drop-down menu to Global.

3. Click the radio button for Patron under the Policy section.

4. Change the Policy drop-down menu to the policy you are currently using for the patrons you wish to move to a different policy.

5. Click the New button and enter the new policy name and short code in the fields provided.  Check the box for Duplicate values from the current policy and then click on OK.]

6. Repeat this process until you have made all the new policies for patrons.  Click Save in the upper-right corner of the window.

Now, set up your new Item policies. following these steps:

1. Click the radio button for Item under the Policy section.

2. Change the Policy drop-down menu to the policy you are currently using for the items you wish to move to a different policy.

3. Click the New button and enter the new policy name and short code in the fields provided.  Check the box for Duplicate values from the current policy and then click on OK.

4. Repeat this process until you have made all the new policies for patrons.  Click Save in the upper-right corner of the window.

5. Close the Preferences window.

Switching Patrons to a New Policy

Now that you have made your new Patron policies, it's time to use Utilities to switch the patrons.  If your new policies are set up by grade, this will be very easy to accomplish.  If you are using some other identifier, find the common value for those people and use it as your Select By criteria.  Below is an example showing how to switch patrons on the Standard Patron policy to a specific grade policy using grade as the Select By criteria.

To switch patrons to a new policy:

1. Go to File on the menu bar and select Utilities.

2. Set the drop-down menus to show one of the new policies and the Select By criteria to select the group to move to the new policy.  Fill in the Starting With and Ending With fields so that just the desire group is select.

3. Click on Run and click Yes when asked if you want to archive.

4. Repeat the process changing the policy and the Select By criteria until you have switched all patrons to the new policies.

Now you are ready to switch your items from the generic policy to a more specific policy.

Switching Items to a New Policy

This will be quite easy since you probably have used call number ranges or prefixes such as FIC as the basis for your new Item policies.  Below is an example of a utility set up to switch items within a specific call number range to the corresponding policy.

To switch items to a new policy:

5. Go to File on the menu bar and select Utilities.

6. Set the drop-down menus to show one of the new policies and the Select By criteria to select the group to move to the new policy.  Fill in the Starting With and Ending With fields so that just the desire group is select.  If you are doing a Dewey Range, use the beginning call number and the ending call number  (e.g. 000 -  099.99999); if you are using a specific prefix such as FIC, put that prefix in both the Starting With and Ending With fields.

7. Click on Run and click Yes when asked if you want to archive.

8. Repeat the process changing the policy and the Select By criteria until you have switched all patrons to the new policies.

Once you have switched all patrons and items to the new policies, statistics will begin to be kept according to the new policies.  Prior statistics will not be changed.

Statistical Reports Based upon Policy Combinations.

The statistical reports that will show you the breakdown of your usage statistics based upon the Patron and Item policy combinations are found by clicking on Reports on the menu bar and then selecting Statistics Records from the drop-down menu.  Below is an example of setting the Statistics Reports window to generate such a report.