Use and User Assessment Toolkit

Aim to gather data on collection access and use.

• Number of times a collection is accessed for any use

Gather additional data on collection access and use.

• Number of times a collection is accessed for specific uses
  • Reading room use
  • Usage hours
  • Reference use
  • Exhibition use
  • Instructional use
  • Operational use
  • Purpose of use
  • Publication use
  • Reproduction requests

Gather data that can inform collection management in terms of movement and location of collections.

• Movement of collections to/from external storage location (can inform location/space management)
• User demographics
• User survey (soliciting direct feedback from users by asking questions that may be open-ended or targeted to specific areas of processing or descriptive work around which staff are seeking input) 

We have some collections with extensive paper finding aids. We’re interested in scanning these to create PDFs and link to them from their respective MARC records.  How much time will we save by not encoding them?

Data needed for previously processed collections:

• Extent
• Average time spent encoding finding aids

What collections are high priorities for digitization?

Data needed:

• Number of requests/uses (onsite and offsite)
• Number of reproduction requests