Always add an internal note when you have selected an 'Other' field from any of the boxes. This will help us understand better understand what is going on.

Always add an internal note when you have selected the 'Insufficient' field from the 'Resources' box. This will help us understand the nature of the issue and come up with an appropriate solution.

Up to you if you want to add an internal note when selecting a field other than 'Other' and/or 'Insufficient'. You don't have to capture the details of everything that is being answered. But you can flag an interesting question or situation.

The more fields you enter, the more context we get for each question when it comes to analysis. Please enter the appropriate field in each of the boxes.

Please enter an internal note whenever you select 'Other' from any box or 'Insufficient' from the 'Resources' box. This will help us better understand the nature of what is going on. Up to you if you want to enter an internal note for any other situation.

That's fine. Happens. Just enter what you think you can remember. We don't need perfect accuracy for our purposes.

Since the 'resources' box assumes librarian expertise as an available resource, it's understandable to worry about admitting that your expertise is 'insufficient'. However, the Ref. Analytics data will not be disaggregated by librarian for the purpose of any analysis. The intention is not to call out any librarian for not having the right answer(s). Rather, the intention is to flag situations where knowledge sharing may need to happen. Knowledge sharing may take the form of: adding pages to the Reference Handbook, creating a LibGuide, sending an email reminding everyone of a policy, or making sure certain information is included when onboarding knew librarians.

Ultimately, the data is self-reported, so you are not compelled to enter any data you aren't comfortable with.

Just use your best judgment. We don't need perfect accuracy. The data collected will be used to provide a narrative of what a librarian does at the reference desk (likely for external-to-library use) and to provide context for where we can create/acquire additional resources to help support our work. 

Also, you can help write an internal note if you think it will help us better understand the context of the question.

In general, we are collecting the data for two purposes: 1) to be able to communicate out to people outside the library about what we do at the Reference Desk and how we do it; 2) to be able to understand where we may improve our service.

Please see the Data Use Cases page for more details.

The Ref. Analytics data show that librarians were marking 98% of their questions as 'normal' in difficulty, 1% as 'challenging' and just a handful as either 'not applicable' or 'very challenging'. This information is not useful to help understand the librarian's workload nor is it useful to see how we can help improve our service.

Yes. Please mark situations as insufficient whenever you can't respond in a way that helps the library patron accomplish their goal without frustration. Although at the moment there may not be a way to acquire new resources or to change our practice, the situation may change in the future, so knowing where new resources may be applied will be useful.

Think of librarian expertise as a resource. If a librarian doesn't know an answer to a question, then the resource is 'insufficient'. For something like 'directions' the vast majority of the time we can figure it out, even if we don't know the answer. That's fine and should be marked as 'sufficient'. However, if you can't figure it out in a reasonable amount of time, or think that someone more knowledgeable should create a LibGuide or add a page to the Reference Handbook, mark it as 'insufficient' so appropriate knowledge sharing can happen.

Lets be honest, we are self-evaluating, so owning up to our own lack of expertise is on an honor system. If you aren't aware that you lack expertise in an area, so be it. If you don't want to admit to it, then just be aware that data is not going to be analyzed to see how librarians are doing but rather to see whether anything can be done to help redirect resources appropriately.

To be sure, self evaluation has downsides. We aren't ever going to be remotely accurate about whether our patrons find our services satisfactory, useful, or of any quality. We will need to evaluate those perspectives in a different fashion.

However, we can use our self evaluation to help describe ourselves to others. And we can use our self evaluation to see where we think we may want support.