who uses L-net?
One of the great things about chat 'widgets' on library websites is that people don't have to enter a lot of information about themselves to get help from a librarian. The down side is that libraries don't get to collect as much information about patrons. I think that's a fair trade for having more patrons getting service.
L-net has adopted this philosophy even in our non-widgetized forms, and the data we used to collect about what "level"of questions people were asking ("General Interest", "College / Research", "High School", "Elementary/Middle School" or "Professional" is no longer available. Since we used this data to infer who was using our service, we have also lost demographic information.
What we do instead is ask a patron to identify the library they usually use. If they come to L-net via a library website, we infer they use that library. If not, we ask them for the name of their library and a zip code, one of which we eventually map to at least one academic, public, school or tribal library, or an area of Oregon unserved by public libraries.
Our statistics by patron's library page reflects this information. This grant year so far, the numbers show up like this:
| Academic library | 18% |
| Public library | 67% |
| School library | 2% |
| Unserved area | 1% |
This doesn't add up to 100% of our patrons because no category is exclusive of the others. If a patron enters "Knight Library" for their library and "97405" for their zip code, we identify them as a patron of both the University of Oregon and the Eugene Public Library. There are also patrons we can't identify at all, and I don't the exact number (I haven't created that report), but I would guess it would be at least 12%, but not much more.
If you're paying attention, and if you staff L-net, you'll also notice that saying that 2% of our patrons are school library patrons is a big, fat, lie. In fact, most of our patrons are kids. Kids who say they use the public library.
To get a better sense of just how many they were, I took a sample by looking at the 158 questions asked on February 23, 2010 and categorized them by what kind of question they were. It's fairly unscientific for categorizing the service as a whole, it is just an analysis of what happened on L-net last Tuesday:
| 59% | were homework related or clearly from kids |
| 15% | were requests for general information |
| 13% | were college-level or about using academic library resources |
| 9% | were questions about library policies |
| 5% | I couldn't figure out by looking at the question alone |