Statistics reports

This page provides two functions
–  Statistics reports that allows you to decide what statistical information you want to generate, and view or export a summary report or the data for period you choose so that it can be transferred to another computer system or presented as formatted text in a reporting product like Excel, for further analysis.
–  Supervisor summaries that provides a summary of the usual metrics that libraries need to account for the work they have done.

Supervisor Summaries

This page provides standard metrics (reports) for the Location and Time period selected in the parameters and is usable by System administrators and Supervisors.

Enter the parameters you need as follows:
Location: Choose the Location for which you want the report provided (All locations provides totals for all locations, Each location provides totals for each of your locations plus a total for all of your locations).
Date type: Choose:
Received date to obtain a report on all the questions received from the Start date to the End date.
Closed date to obtain a report on all questions closed from the Start date to the End date.
Start and End date: Choose the period for which you want the statistics accumulated. The specified Star and End dates are inclusive.

When you click on Submit a standard set of totals for the selected questions (received or closed during the period) at the specified Location/s during the specified Time period will be displayed as follows:
– Questions and DeskStats: Received via by Question type: provides an analysis of how all the questions for the selected period (full questions and DeskStats i.e. your entire workload recorded in RefTracker) were received e.g. by phone, web page or at the Service desk.
– Questions and DeskStats: Staff by Question type: provides an analysis of what staff were responsible for the questions in the selected period (both full questions and DeskStats).
– Questions and DeskStats: Status group by Question type: provides an analysis of the current status of all the questions (full and DeskStats) for the selected period e.g. open , in review, closed. (Note for this information to be accurate the report must be run as close to the end of the selected period as possible.)
– Questions: Request group by Target date: provides an analysis of how well the questions that were entered into the system in full, were responded to in relation to their Target response date (i.e. how well service objectives were meet).
– Time expended on DeskStats by Request type: provides an analysis of how much librarian time in minutes was spent on answering questions recorded in DeskStats for the selected period (add to the previous report to get total for your system).
– Time expended on Questions by Request type: provides an analysis of how much librarian time in minutes was spent on answering full questions for the selected period (add to next report to get total for your system).
– Costs recorded in relation to Questions by Request type: provides an analysis of the costs recorded in relation to full questions Received or answered during the selected period. Note that there is currently no equivalent report for Deskstats.

Statistical reporting

The purpose of this screen is to provide more flexible reporting than is provided by the Supervisor Summaries screen, including the ability to extract data in .csv compliant format for use by another computer program, or layout that can be viewed in Excel.

This screen is usable by both System administrators and Supervisors, however, in recognition of the industry obligation to keep patron information confidential, Supervisors are not given any options that would allow them to see client statistics or data.

Note that the data collected for questions entered via DeskStats is not the same as the data collected for questions entered into the system in full (via New or Quick), so you need to select which data you want to report on – and according to what you select different reporting options are available.

To use this screen, choose your Selection criteria and Presentation criteria parameters, then click on Submit, and your report will appear at the bottom of this screen under the heading Results, or a download window will be displayed.

Selection Criteria Parameters
Source: Choose the type of data that you want to report on. Choosing Questions will provide results about the questions that have been entered into RefTracker in full.
Choosing DeskStats will provide results about the questions that have been answered in a single service, and so only recorded as DeskStats in either the online or batch mode.
Choosing Questions and DeskStats will provide statistics for your entire reference operations – note that because the data collected for these two types of transactions is different, not all reports are available for the combined selection Questions and DeskStats .
System administrators only can also select Client data only in this option to obtain statistics about the clients using your system. The system contains one client record for every question in the system, however some questions are collected without client data so the count of client results obtained from this screen will not match the full question count and should not be used as an indicator of volume.

Question type: This line only appears for Questions, as it allows you to exclude (or include) those questions that were simply entered in order to populate the knowledge base. By default KB only questions are excluded as they are not a direct service to your client base. To include these questions, tick the KB only tick box.

Location: Often you only need to report on the statistics for one of your locations, or you want statistics for all Locations, but broken up by each of your library Locations.
Choose a specific Location, or All locations for a total of all of your Locations, or choose Each location for subtotals by each library location with a total for all locations.

Status group: Select the status of the questions that you want to report on, for example, Open , Closed , or Any for all questions. You will generally choose Any unless specifically reporting on questions with a specific Status.

Date type: Choose whether the start and end date will refer to the date on which the question was received or the date on which it was closed.
Closed date is default as it is the most sensible choice when you want to know the cost of developing answers, but Received date is sensible for measuring incoming workload.
Note that this line only appears for source Questions as by definition all DeskStats are received and closed on the same day.

Start and End date: Enter the starting and ending dates for which you want to report statistics. These dates are inclusive.

Presentation criteria

Report type: Depending on the Selection criteria that you have chosen, a selection of report types will be available. Choose the report type that suits your needs. The report types available are:
Time Period : This report provides a quantitative summary report with x axis the code table that you choose, and Y axis the time period grouping that you choose in the parameters below. For example this report can show you how many of each request type arrived each day of your reporting period.
Target date : This report provides a quantitative summary report with x axis the code table that you choose in the parameters below, and Y axis whether the Target response date was met or missed. For example this report can show you how many questions were answered within their target response date, and how many were not, by staff member, throughout your reporting period.
Time expended : This report provides a quantitative summary report with x axis the code table that you choose in the parameters below, and Y axis the librarian time used in minutes in answering the questions for the time period you have selected. For example this report can show you the amount of library time spent, by the organisational divisions of the clients who asked the questions, for the period you have chosen to report on.
Cost : This report provides a quantitative summary report with x axis the code table that you choose in the parameters below, and Y axis the costs attributed to questions answered in the time period you have selected. For example this report can show you the cost of library time and other expenses, by the organisational divisions of the clients who asked the questions, for the period you have chosen to report on.
Code table : This report provides a quantitative summary report with x axis the code table that you choose in the X axis parameter below, and Y axis the code table that you choose in the Y axis parameter below. For example this report can give you an analysis of the number of questions of each type that were handled for each of the organisational divisions of the clients who asked the questions, for the period you have chosen to report on.
Data extract : This report shows the information recorded about the questions that comply with the selection criteria you have specified.
The Data extract option is only accessible by systems administrators, for security reasons. When Data extract is selected:
– for DeskStats the complete record will be made available, or
– for full questions, the non text information in the Question table of the Data dictionary is provided, plus the Total time, and Total cost fields from the Journal table of the Data Dictionary. To this base amount of information you can add more information using the Include fields option that shows only if you have selected this option (see below for details of this option).

Time period grouping: When this line appears it allows you to determine the y axis time period grouping e.g. day provides statistics for each day during the period you specify, whereas month reports statistics accumulated over each month during the period you specify. Analysis is done in the time of the logged on user.

Output type: Choose Display to show the information you select using these parameter options, on the screen, and Export (download) to obtain the information in Excel or as a .csv file. Please note that large amounts of data can take a LONG time to display. Sometimes, when you are working with large amounts of data it is faster to use the Export (download) option!

Include fields: This option only appears when you have selected a Data extract report type option for full questions. It allows you to determine whether you want Text fields, Client information, Bibliographic information included, Resources and/or Categories, included in the data records. You may wish to exclude some of these things for privacy reasons, or even because the reporting product that you are going to use this output data with, does not like long text fields.
Including Text fields includes the text of fields from the Data dictionary Question table like the Question, Answer, Place already looked, etc., that include large amounts of text (some reporting products don’t like handling large amounts of text).
Including Client fields includes the fields from the Client table of the Data Dictionary (you may want to exclude Client information from you exported information to ensure that, for privacy reasons, the patron information is not retained into the future). In order to protect the privacy of client data, Supervisors are not given the option to include this client fields.
Including Bibliographic fields includes the fields from the Bibliographic table of the Data Dictionary.
Including Resources adds a column for each Resource that you have defined in your system. When a Resource has been used with that question, the date on which the Resource was used will appear in that Resource’s column, followed by “~” and the comment text if a Resource comment was recorded for that question. If the Resource was used more than once, information about each usage is separated by “|”.
Including Categories adds a column for each Category that you have defined in your system, containing a “Y” if the Category has been applied to that question.

X axis code table: This option only appears for some report types. Choose the code table for which you want to report statistics, for example choosing Request type will provide statistics for the chosen period, for each of the different sorts of requests that were handled during your selected period. As code tables can be used differently in different RefTracker systems, you need to be familiar with the codes stored in each table, and how they have been used in Request form design, and in your DeskStats screen to be able to interpret the exact meaning of a code table. The standard use for each code table is described in the but the name and description for the code table should identify what it has been used for as code tables can be appropriately named. The standard use for each field is described in the  the Appendix to the Administration manual.

Y axis code table: This option only appears when you are selecting a Code table type report. Choose the code table for which you want to do two way analysis, for example choosing Staff when the X axis is Request type will provide an analysis of what request types each staff member has been handling during your selected period.

Note that the code tables available for reporting under Question statistics and DeskStats are different. In particular, for DeskStats you can report on the Comments entered through the DeskStats screen.

Also note that any number of Categories and Resources can be recorded in association with a question, so the totals for the Categories and Resources code tables do NOT represent the total number of questions received during that period (whereas fields that are recorded one per question such as Location, Staff, Age/Group, etc. all give the total number of questions received during the selected period). Also note that when reporting on Categories or Resources, the date period that you select will reflect that date on which the Category or Resource was added to the question NOT the date on which the question was received or closed.

When you are happy with the report parameters you have provided in this form, click on Submit and your report will be run and displayed at the bottom of this screen under a Results heading.

More on formatted reports
The results of a formatted report that you specified using these parameter options, will appear at the bottom of the screen.

For the Code tables that you have chosen, columns will be displayed for each entry in the code table governing that field, that had statistics recorded against it during the reporting period chosen using the Start and End date parameters. So, for example, if you have no questions for a particular Location, during the reporting period you have chosen, a column for that particular Location will not appear.

Rows are determined by the type of report e.g. when controlled by time period grouping a row will be displayed for each time period (as selected by the Time period grouping parameter) that had statistics recorded against it during the reporting period chosen using the Start and End date parameters. So, if you are reporting by day, and no questions arrived on a particular day, then a row for that day’s date, will not appear.

Both Totals and Percentages are shown for each row and column.

You can print these results by simply clicking on the print button of your Web browser, but some reports by necessity, are wider than a screen and will not print well in this fashion. We recommend that in these instances you choose the Export (download) output type and choose Open, to view and print this sort of data using Excel.

More on Data extract reports
The results of a Data extract report, will appear at the bottom of the screen, unless you choose to Export (download) the data.

For the period that you have chosen, ALL questions that were received in that period are displayed, one row per question. The column headings are the names for each data element of the tables you choose to export, and the order in which they are presented in the Data extract record are as per their Sequence in each table in the Data dictionary. Note that when you select to export the Question data, the system exports the data in the Question table of the Data dictionary, plus the Total time and Total cost fields from the Journal table. You can export additional information by selecting options from the Include fields parameter line, e.g. Text fields, Bib fields, etc.

Rerunning a report
To rerun a report for say, the same time period, but a different code table, simply change the appropriate parameter/s (in this case X or Y axis code table) and click on Submit.

Exporting the formatted report to Excel or .csv
To export the body of your formatted report to Excel or a .csv file so that you can manipulate it or do further analysis or graphing in a reporting product, simply change the Format selection to Export (download) and click on Submit.

A download window will appear.
– Selecting Open, will display the exported data in Excel, where it can be manipulated, analysed, graphed and saved.
– Selecting Save, brings up a standard Microsoft Save box that allows you to choose where the file will be saved. Note that Microsoft presumes you will want to save the file as an Excel spreadsheet. To save it as an industry standard .csv file change “Save as type” at the bottom of the screen to “All files”, and add the .csv extension to the file name.

SQL ad hoc reporting
In addition to the reporting provided by this screen, libraries with in-house RefTracker systems, can use an SQL compliant report writer, and the information provided in Data dictionary, to query the live database. Note that your licence for use of RefTracker prevents you from changing the database in any way, as that would make the product unsupportable, but we do encourage libraries with in-house systems to get their IT department involved with an SQL compliant reporting product, if they need reports over and above the functions that we provide through the Statistical Reporting and Supervisor Summaries screen.

Periodic extraction of statistical data
We highly recommend that you use this screen at the end of each of your statistical reporting periods to extract the data for all questions received (or closed, according to your library policy) during that reporting period (both Full questions and DeskStats). By exporting the data you will have captured a picture of the database as it was at the end of the reporting period, which can be used into the future for historical reporting for that period. Reporting done on the live database reflects the current status of the database which means that when questions are deleted they no longer appear in the statistical reporting. Retaining a copy of the Data extract as it was at the end of each reporting period ensures that accurate statistics can be obtained into the future, even once records are deleted.