Submitted by admin-boss on
Hello all,
Recently I received the following question:
"Will you be breaking out statistics for institutional queue only use?"
Unfortunately, QuestionPoint's stats don't work that way. Institutional queues are quite well-integrated with the overall service. You can pull out stats for your institution alone, but it doesn't track how many come in when someone is logged into an institutional queue alone vs. their institutional queue plus the general queue, vs. other libraries logged into your queue as part of the general service.
Essentially, all traffic that comes from your students goes into your institutional queue, whether you're staffing it alone, or you're staffing the whole service with your own queue active as part of it. And your institutional queue is on when AskAway is on regardless of whether or not a service provider from your institution is logged in (due to the fact that library staff will log into all queues when they staff the service).
So it's not easy to ask QP directly whether traffic is coming from when you're staffing an institutional queue alone or not. But there are ways to infer it. (Procedures to access the statistics are outlined at the end.)
Outside normal hours:
You can pull statistics that tell you what time questions have come in. If you're staffing your queue outside normal AskAway hours, you can use that to identify how much usage you're getting out of those extended hours - just compare your numbers to the AskAway schedule. Anything outside normal hours is generated solely by your institutional queue.
Institutional queue schedules:
If you have a regular schedule for folks staffing the institutional queue by itself, you can also use these stats to see how many questions have come into your queue during those hours. Just look at the hourly breakdown of chat sessions, and compare to your schedule.
You can see both the number of sessions requested by your patrons, and the number picked up by your institution's AskAwayers.
More generally:
If you look at the Reports of Sessions (a.k.a. Statistics by Month and Term), you can track what proportion of your AskAway sessions are handled by your library vs. by the AskAway in general.
When generating the statistics yourself:
Look at the Sessions with Our Patrons column. "Library" indicates how many of your patrons' sessions were handled by your library. "BME" indicates the number of your patrons' sessions handled by the rest of AskAway. The total should indicate the total number of sessions initiated by your patrons.
When downloading from the AskAway website, look at the Handled By Us and Handled By Others columns.
Watch these numbers over time. If AskAway visibility is good on your website and your institutional queues are staffed regularly, you can expect the numbers for your patrons handled by your own institution to increase over time.
Getting your institution's statistics:
To see a simple breakdown of dates, hours, and numbers for your institution, log into QuestionPoint as an administrator and follow this path:
- Click the Reports tab near the top of the page
- Click Institution Report
- Select Daily Report for breakdown by date, or Monthly Report for breakdown by month. Then select the appropriate year and month, and under "Generate report for", select "Chat"
- Highlight and copy the results, and paste them into a Word file
To get details about your institution's chat sessions on an individual level, use the Form Fields. To generate a form fields report, follow the directions here.
Or you can download our own Form Fields data for the whole service, and filter to your own patrons. Find that here.
For the Reports of Sessions, which tell you how many sessions your patrons requested, how many of those were handled by your institution, and how many you handled overall:
- Click the Reports tab near the top of the page
- Select Reports of Sessions
- Set your start and end dates
- Copy the information into a spreadsheet
Or, simply go to http://askaway.org/staff/statistics and download the monthly stats that we post.
Beware that unless otherwise specified, QuestionPoint's timestamps are in Eastern Standard Time (EST), and need to be adjusted by three hours to reflect the correct time.
As always, if you've any questions or need further clarification, don't hesitate to contact me.
Cheers,
Brandon
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