Tally of Education/Math/HAVC/classrooms directions 9/28-10/9

We have been asked to keep a tally of directions we give to Education, Mathematics, HAVC, and related classrooms from Friday, September 28th through Tuesday, October 9th to assess the effectiveness of new signage. I have placed the tally sheet on a clipboard that will be stowed under the desk on the right-hand side. I will give the stat sheet to Sarah after the 9th. Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Laura

UCSC campus crime stats

Hi everyone,


Here is useful link to "http://www.ucsc.edu/about/crime-stats/"> UCSC campus crime stats , including an archive back to 1994.

Best,
Laura

Good site for unemployment data (cities or states)

Jan and Lucia found this source which might be of use if you are asked for the unemployment rate for states or cities. Link to the site:

Economy at a glance

The "at a glance" feature allows you to click on a state, or drill down to a census designated metro area (we are in Santa Cruz - Watsonville), to see labor force statistics including the unemployment rate. Data is monthly, for the preceding 6 months. June is in there right now.

Monday, October 4th: CLA Snapshot Day

Hi Deskers,

Monday, October 4th is CLA's Snapshot Day and UCSC is participating. The impact for the Ref Desk is the way we tally statistics. We won't do a separate tally form for this. Instead, we will ask staff to record the number of questions within a transaction in the narrative box (for example, if you verify 3 citations, that's 3 questions, not the single long or short question we normally count, etc.). So go ahead and log your question as directional, short, or lengthy but also include the extra transaction information in the narrative box.

If you have questions, please ask Laura or Lucia.

Thanks, Laura

(corrected) Reference Desk Transactions Report, Summer Sessions 2010

During the two summer sessions of 2010 (21^st June–27^th August), the McHenry Library Reference Desk was open for four hours per day, Monday through Friday, from 1 till 5pm. This tallies to a total of twenty hours per week, or 200 hours for the entire ten-week period. In that period, 387 desk transactions were logged by Reference staff in SurveyMonkey (of which 379 included explanatory remarks). Since Reference staff have been logging desk queries through SurveyMonkey (from March 2010), 2501 transactions have been recorded:

March (includes Spring Break week)—144

April—685
May—927
June (prior to Summer Session)—738

The distribution of queries shows that the 1–2pm hour is most popular with 31.3 percent (121) of transactions, descending with each subsequent hour: 27.4 percent (106) from 2–3pm; 19.6 percent (76) from 3–4pm; and 19.4 percent (75) from 4–5pm. Additionally, 2.3 percent (9) of the questions were recorded at times when desk service was not available. While the majority of transactions were under five minutes (55.3% or 214), 29.2 percent (113) were five minutes or longer; directional questions were only 15.5 percent (60) of the total. Just over 3 percent (76) of the total came to us via telephone, and 2 percent (52) were printing or computing questions. (These transactions do not include off-desk, Ask A Librarian/QuestionPoint, or personal e-mail enquiries.)


Transaction Highlights

• Helped [emeritus librarian] determine the signature on an 1860 original letter he was transcribing from the Hihn-Younger Archive
• Recent UCSC graduate: advice on applying to master's degree v. doctoral programmes in pursuit of teaching at community-college level; Web site for faculty postings at California community colleges
• Emeritus-faculty proxy needed help with databases; also said that he has always received great service from our desk, and how much he appreciated that
• Assisted two lecturers working on a project which required analyzing the table of contents and physical layout/arrangement of a few journals. We only had electronic access to the journals they needed…. I suggested they contact an ENVS professor who I knew once used to edit the journal to see if he had a personal print subscription.
• Patron looking for data sets related to education from the perspective of population, transportation, health, environment, etc. Showed him ICPSR, several federal gov. sites, Rand California and our statistics guide. Also gave him contact info for [local ICPSR rep] and Lucia
• Books, articles, primary documents on Wilder Ranch, its history, and the Ohlone who lived in the area > extensive searching for, variously, Wilder Ranch, Rancho Refugio, Ohlone, Awaswas tribelet in local history titles in Reference Area, Cruzcat, SCPL, America: History & Life + advice on general Spain>Mexico>US California history and land grants
• Graduate student had ILL request for microfilm from New York State Archives denied as 'no lending library' although NYSA site states desired items 'available through ILL' > contacted our ILL, who will contact NYSA directly to enquire about item + found microfilm purchasing information on NYSA site to offer patron alternative if ILL unsuccessful
• 1970s-80s index for Santa Cruz Sentinel? > no such, but showed patron how to use SCPL Newspaper Clippings file along with microfilm
• Community member: reliable Web information/advice on home foreclosure options and alternatives > found relevant pages at HUD, FDIC, California Department of Real Estate
• UCSC staff member who is also a Cabrillo summer student needed help finding an expert from UCSC on global warming to interview for a project. Helped him find several names and printed contact info, primarily [Earth & Planetary Sciences faculty] who spoke on the topic for Synergy
• Historical information about the invention of the washing machine - found one book in Ref and several in stacks. Also wanted advertisements from different decades. Gave her call no. for All-American Ads by decades.
• Tutorial on finding popular articles reporting new scientific research then finding scholarly studies on which articles are based > New York Times and Academic Search Complete, then PubMed and PsycINFO
• [Community researcher] needed help finding and accessing a document on land use from 1878. It's an online document that Hastings owns in their Making of Modern Law database. He'll have to visit Hastings to access it. Also spent time telling him how to best approach access to these documents, when to use Cruzcat, limitations of Melvyl, and about Calcat. He was very appreciative!
• Former student doing an internship for [Politics faculty], researching mayors who are notable or “heroes”—Academic Search Complete, newspapers, how UC-eLinks works, ILL process, Cruzcat -- subject headings "mayors", Dictionary of National Biography, Gale Biographies database, ref book: Biographical Dictionary Of American Mayors, 1820-1980
• Staff member looking for FCC decision concerning wireless signal boosters > found public notices and comments in FCC Electronic Comment Filing System, eventually determined from listed proceedings that FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau had jurisdiction in matter, went to their separate site and found Headlines Archive lists all official public notices, news releases, and orders/decisions > determined no decision has yet been made in the case of signal boosters (as comment is still being collected)
• Researcher from UCSF called to verify a citation from Source: Encyclopedia of Drugs, Alcohol & Addictive Behavior. We have title electronically, and in print. Almost needed to use the print because the title search didn't return results. Determined there was a slight title change from what the researcher had vs. the title in the source.
• Advice on appropriate use, according to Chicago Manual of Style, of footnotes v. bibliography v. in-text notes v. reference list

Desk stats now online

Just a reminder that we have moved to collecting Reference statistics online. The SurveyMonkey page is bookmarked on the browser toolbar on every machine at the desk.

There are only two required fields, but it would be helpful if you could fill out other fields if you have time between questions.

Many thanks to Frank Gravier for getting this project off the ground and on the computers.

thank you,

Lucia

Desk stats migrating to online form

We are migrating McHenry Ref Desk statistics gathering online, using SurveyMonkey. We will start using this on Monday, March 29th, the first day of Spring quarter. We will no longer be using the paper forms and clipboard. However, we do have them on hand in case the power goes out or there is some other unforeseen problem.

Here's the important things to know:

There are only two *required* fields: Shift Time and Desk Stats Category (Dir, Short, Long). The other fields are optional. It would be helpful if you could fill them out, but you don't need to if it's busy.

Category refresher:
+ Directional: Giving directions. Pointing to a resource or service point or location of materials. Directions to the bathroom, etc.

+ Short: Anything more than directional that requires explanation up to 5 minutes, such as how to read call numbers, how to look up a book, etc.

+ Lengthy: Anything longer than 5 minutes.

The form is bookmarked on the toolbars at every Ref desk machine as "MCH REF DESK STATS." If you want to take a look at it now, use this URL: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/mchrefstats.

Keep this URL handy in case you need to enter statistics after your desk shift.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

thank you,

Lucia

Graphing demographic data

This is an interesting website for graphing demographic data. Limited datasets available but you can load your own data.

http://stats.oecd.org/oecdfactbook/

-Greg

New Gov data and stats site

Take a look at the newly launched government data and statistics site. Looks like a very professional, 2.0 type of site full of demographic, scientific, and geographic data. http://www.data.gov/

-Lucia

Summer stat sheets

To conserve paper, and since we have reduced hours, Laura has created half-sheet size stat sheets for the summer. The new ones are on the clipboard, and more are in the vertical file drawer under a pink label "Statistic Sheets."