Let's talk data
Hey all, so I was reading Moneyball this weekend and I thought about all of the data that my Library collects to report to the board. Program attendance, daily door count, circ numbers, all that good stuff. I started thinking about how this could potentially be valuable information, but frankly I can't decide what to do with it.
For example, if we knew that on Tuesdays we got on average 50 more visitors than Wednesdays, would we try to schedule more programs on Tuesdays? Or does it make more sense to try to do more on Wednesdays? Would we change the way we promote our programs in house on Tuesdays so that those 50 more people saw what we had going on? There are a million of these questions and I can't really decide what the best course of action is here, and frankly I'm not even sure that this is worth digging into.
Do you do anything with this kind of data at your Library?
Posted Jan 7, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC
Door counts and collecting that level of library data is more useful for retrospective analysis than one-off experimentation the way you described, IMHO.
Following that same line of thinking though, my next question would be if that's a seasonal trend (are they students doing homework?) or representative of a specific library use (e.g. do you see more hold pickups in the same timeframe?)
Would also be curious to know what % increase that average 50+ visits represents. If it's huge, sure, there's an argument for trying something new, why not leverage the opportunity.
Yeah you're totally right, the data isn't specific enough. It's just daily numbers of people, no demographics. I tried to compare the daily numbers with the "season" sort of and also what programs we had going on that day, but there's no real consistency there. Those are probably the two biggest reasons why I'm struggling to put anything together here.
50 people is about 20-25% of our average daily visits. It's a pretty big number for us. We're tiny.
Opportunity is a great word for my goal here. It feels like there's an opportunity to use this information that we've more or less discarded to just simply make better decisions. I'm just not sure that I have enough information to actually use it.