Hours of use of a 24x7 live reference service

[Sloan, Bernie]

I'm the evaluation consultant for the Ready for Reference service, a
collaborative 24x7 live reference service being piloted by eight academic
libraries in the Alliance Library System in Illinois. This pilot project has
been funded by an LSTA grant from the Illinois State Library. The project
uses the LSSI software.

I've been looking at Ready for Reference usage data, and have compiled some
information on the times of day the system is used. I don't recall having
seen this kind of info before, and I assume that many of you might be
interested. As I mention below, I consider this to be pretty preliminary
right now, i.e., nothing to base operational/policy decisions on at this
point.

If enough people are interested, I will periodically update these data and
post to the list. Also, if you have done an "hours of use" summary for your
live reference service, I'd really like to hear from you.

Some disclaimers/info before I go any farther:

1. These data are based on 176 user-initiated live reference sessions from a
roughly two-week period from March 28 through April 12.

2. Times are Central Time (US). I'm not sure that really makes much of a
difference, but I figured someone might ask the question anyway.  :-)

3. These data on hours of use represent the use of the Ready for Reference
service in the early stages of the project. The usage patterns represented
below may well change as the number of sessions increases, and as more
people begin to use the service.

4. These data are based on the end time of each session. It is probable that
a number of these sessions spanned the boundaries of the time slots (i.e.,
beginning shortly before the end of one slot, and ending shortly after the
beginning of another).

Here's the hours-of-use breakdown for March 28 through April 12:

* 45.88% of the sessions occurred between 8AM and 5PM
* 29.41% of the sessions took place between 5PM and 10PM
* 13.53% of the sessions happened between 10PM and 12AM
* 9.41% of the sessions were between 12AM and 2AM
* 0% of the sessions were between 2AM and 5AM
* 1.76% of the sessions took place between 5AM and 8AM

Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant
University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
338 Henry Administration Building
506 S. Wright Street
Urbana, IL  61801
Phone: (217) 333-4895
Fax:     (217) 265-0454
E-mail: bernies at uillinois.edu