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It is April of 2016, which means now is a great time to look at the Hirsh Library School Affiliation Survey from March and see how it compares to the one from October. Let’s get started!

School Total

First thing is first: PHPD has rocked up in numbers! Dental has traditionally been the most frequently counted school in this survey, but this is the first time that Medical has been dethroned as 2nd place. And look at the number differences: The difference from first to second place is 21 people, and the difference of second to third is 15. That’s ridiculous! We are very busy people here at HHSL.

“But Tom, what about Circ this time around? Does that match up to what we’re seeing here?” Oh, of course not. As you can see here:

Circ

Medical keeps their hold on the highest circulation of the week. However, what’s truly interesting is the strong showing of the PHPD programs and Nutrition. Look at those numbers! As someone whose whole job revolves around circulation at this library, it’s very exciting to see the growing interest in all programs across the board.

It is, generally, at this point that I go and show you something like a breakdown of the schools by floor. And therefore, I’m going to do that right now!Floors

The 7th floor is, undoubtedly, the monarch of the floors. Look at that. Medical, Dental (by a massive margin) and Sackler/PHPD programs (by a smaller but still strong margin) all love themselves the 7th floor. I still find it interesting, though, that for Dental it’s 7th and then 5th, but for Medical it’s 7th and then 6th. A difference in study habits, perhaps – Dental students might be more interested in group rooms, whereas the Medical students are looking for singular study spaces (like small tables and study carrels). It would account for the 7th floor’s popularity with both, and then the difference in second favorite.

Nutrition seems to be much more interested in being able to talk – the openness of the 5th floor (and its collaboration rooms), followed by the room-heavy 7th.

And this is where we run into a limitation with the way we’ve been doing this survey: combining PA, PHPD, MBS, and Sackler all into one category. We know that the MBS program has been growing each year, and we know that the PA program has been growing. And PHPD encapsulates a number of other degree programs. Sadly, until now, I haven’t been able to distinguish between them when looking at this survey.

Going forward, however, I’ll be able to! We’re working on some back-end adjusting of how we collect all of this data, so that way we can be much more accurate across the board while going forward. After all, accuracy leads to knowledge, and knowledge is what we’re striving for here! I’m not sure anyone at HHSL was quite prepared for the way our numbers have exploded over the last couple years, so we’re playing a bit of catch-up in a few areas to make sure we can still serve the needs of our entire community!

But you’re probably wondering how March measures up against our October Affiliation count. It looks something like this:

Schools 2

It looks a lot like that! That’s surprising, kind of. Right? I mean, that is a lot of people. A. Lot. I find it interesting that Medical and Dental jumped so high (Boards and the infamous Dental Exam Block probably had a bit to do with that), but the PHPD programs dropped a little, and Nutrition bumped up slightly. Now what about the floors? How do those look?

Floors 2

They look busy is what they look like. Every single floor got busier! This, of course, comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody – it’s a well known fact that we’re busier in the spring than the fall (fun fact! Currently, October is the busiest month, followed by March, and February. April is traditionally the outright busiest of the year, however, so we’ll have to see how things turn out). But still, it’s kind of cool to see that each floor went up by just about the same proportion across the board. That’s ridiculous. That’s not supposed to happen in the real world! And yet, here we are.

Finally, we have the weekdays:

Weekdays

As you may have realized by now, I deal with a ton of statistics during the year. The red bars you see above most closely resemble the regular, month-by-month bell curve of how busy each day of the week is. The busiest day of the week might shift a bit between Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but in general? It looks like that. Like a bell curve. But the blue! October did something unique, and dipped right in the middle of the week.

It’s worth noting: neither of these weeks had any major exams, and neither week had any holidays. They were chosen for both of those reasons. Perhaps that Wednesday in October was unseasonably nice, and everyone just really needed to be outside? Can’t say I blame them.

So there you have it! Our Affiliation Stats round-up. I’m already looking forward to doing some of the year-end numbers, and finding out just how crazy busy HHSL has been in the 2015-2016 academic year.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go look at something other than Excel for a few hours. Perhaps a few days.

Tom

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Hello hello! It’s about that time again: I’m going to fill your life with statistics and numbers and hopefully a few interesting facts, and you can enjoy it in between panicking about that paper due tonight and that exam you have tomorrow. This post will be a perfect length for you to read and then hit the bathroom before your break time is up and you need to get back to work.

So. Let’s get started!

October was busy for us. Crazy busy, in fact. As you can see below, October was far and away the busiest month we had at the desk – we were just shy of 4300 checkouts! Egads. It was also the busiest month we had with our roaming statistics (which you’ve most likely seen – a staff member walking around with an iPad counting heads in the library). You may recognize these numbers as “not even close.”

Circ vs Roam

“But what about the Affiliation Week?” you may ask. Well I’m glad you asked! The answer is kind of fascinating. So one thing that we strive for with this is to be as accurate as we can with what a “typical” week looks like here. As you can imagine, that is quite difficult, given the propensity of the schools to have full blocks of exams, staggered about the semester.  We chose October 25th – 31st this year, since there were no exams that week, and therefore the numbers would be as least skewed as we could make them. Here’s what we saw.

Affiliation

The Dental School dominated the counted programs. This is probably not a surprise to anyone, since that’s been the trend. However, what is a surprise is the combined Sackler/PHPD (which includes PA and MBS). Their numbers have absolutely skyrocketed, and now even outpace the Medical school. That’s crazy! Unfortunately, the way the Affiliation data is collected, we don’t really know how much of that would be MBS students getting ready for MCATs, or PA hanging around and studying after (or in between) classes. But it’s still awesome to see!

If you break it down by floor, you’ll notice everybody loves the 7th floor, because of course they do! It’s great! Tons of individual study space, and plenty of group rooms. Dental looks like if they couldn’t take the 7th, they’d stay on the 4th, but everybody else started on the 7th and then trickled downward. Well…except for Friedman. Nutrition students like the 5th floor, it looks like – possibly big fans of the collaboration rooms?

Affiliation Floors

Incidentally, this past November I actually went to a library conference down in Atlanta. I don’t know if you’ve been to Atlanta, but if you go, make sure to have some local beers (many good microbreweries down there), and go check out the Georgia Aquarium! The whale sharks are insane.

Sorry, got carried away there. The reason I mention this is that all of my work with stats here at Hirsh over the years led me to presenting a poster down at the conference! I talked with people from around the country about data collection and its uses. As it turns out, your very own Hirsh Health Sciences Library is at something of a leading edge with all of this! See, the entire philosophy behind finding all these numbers out is that we want to be able to serve all of you as best as we possibly can, and every piece of information helps with that mission. I don’t tend to get too technical with these posts, but we do know (for instance) that laptops, Mac chargers, and phone chargers are the most popular items to be checked out. Books have been slipping every year as the schools push toward digitization, and the library has to be able to stay on top of that.

Well, we’re not alone! Other libraries – all libraries, really – are trying to keep up with the changing face of their patron body, and they aren’t always getting the info they need from their patrons or schools before they actually need it. So they’re starting to turn to data collection – Circulation statistics, head counts, all that stuff – in an attempt to see trends as they’re starting. I was very popular at this conference, as it turned out.

And in case you doubt my story, here’s the proof:

2015-11-12 17.10.13

That is me, looking a combination of tired and excited, standing next to my poster (which, I’d like to note, was visually designed by the delightful Katherine Morley, Admin Coordinator for Hirsh, and head of our PR committee – so the brains behind events like our monthly crafts). The graphs on there are actual data from the library – specifically, it’s Circulation, Roaming, and Affiliation data from July 2013 through October 2015. Two and a half years of numbers, and trends, and watching our library grow and expand. I won’t lie – I was feeling pretty proud of what we do here while I was talking to people.

In the nerdiest way possible, of course.

On that note, I will leave you be. Thank you for sticking with me on this post! I truly appreciate it. Now, go hit the bathroom, get yourself some caffeine delivery system of choice, and get back to studying! I have faith that you’ll do well, but fortune favors the prepared.

Good luck with the exams, and have a good break!

Until next time,
Tom

 

 

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Can you believe it looked like this outside when we started the program?

Can you believe it looked like this outside when we started the program?

On March 1st, we started a room booking pilot program, in response to student requests that we make some of our library rooms bookable. We designated seven rooms on Sackler 5 as our collaboration rooms, set up an online reservation system, and let the collaborating on projects and presentations begin!

We’re pleased to report that the pilot was popular and that we will be continuing it through the fall semester.

Here are some stats, for bookings made between March 1st and May 30th:
Total bookings: 272

Unique users: 100

Most popular rooms: 502 and 504

Most popular day of the week: Wednesday

Average group size: 3 people

Average booking length: 3 hours

Want to book a room? Read our policy and view the schedule at http://bit.ly/hhslcollab

Happy Collaborating!

Hello there! I’m glad you can join me today. We’ve been posting a lot of recipes lately, so I thought I’d join in by giving you one on how to make an entire Health Sciences library. Let’s jump right in, shall we?

First thing’s first: this is going to be a bit bigger than we’re used to. That’s because Hirsh is such a popular library, we’ve had to up all the numbers in the recipe!

Now, you’ll want to be fairly liberal with your application of visitors to the library. For instance, this past year, we had 110,084 people come through. That’s nuts (which are also delicious)! Of course, you don’t want to risk the recipe being unbalanced by such a big number, so you will need to balance it out with a lot of circulation, as well. In our case, we balanced it out by having 38,990 checkouts this past year. It’s a 46% jump over what we had the previous year, but it’s been working well!

Incidentally, you’ll want to make sure your recipe includes technology. A lot of technology. In our case, we had 9,417 checkouts of laptops alone (6,440 of which were for just the Macbooks we have!). We also had 5,557 phone charger checkouts, and 3,019 checkouts of Mac chargers. Like I said, our recipe was pretty popular last year, and only got more popular this year!

If you’re a visual person (like me), then this should help: the total circulation by month of the last two years (click to enlarge).

 

Graph

 

Now what about individual spices, you may ask? Well that’s easy enough. You want to mix in 10,173 Dental students and 12,601 Medical. Bring to a simmer. Then mix in 8,029 Nutrition students and 5,266 from the combined PHPD programs. Bring to a boil, and add a dash of Sackler students – specifically, 569 of them.

Now, put in the oven, and turn the heat up. I’d suggest turning it up to 12 months, but keep an eye on it – not all of these ingredients can go in there for quite the same amount of time. Some need about 9, others can be an intense 6. I suggest occasionally stirring.

When you pull it all out, let it sit and cool off for a few months. I suggest setting it in front of Netflix for the duration of July, just to be sure.

Once it hits September, dig on in, it’s ready to go! But be forewarned: this dish is going to start strong and only get bigger from there.

Happy Eating!

Tom

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This past October, from the 19th to the 25th, we ran our semi-annual School Affiliation statistics again. This time around, we were able to keep it away from a major exam block, and we also grabbed the circulation data for that time to make sure we got the best picture of the week. Since it was shorter than last time, this post will be relatively quick. But hopefully you’ll still find it interesting!

First thing is first: how many people were in the library that week? Well, we counted a total of 3,230 people that week, 695 of which were here on Wednesday alone. You can see the breakdown below.

Total People

 

Now, what you’re probably really wondering is how that breaks down by school, right? The answer is rather interesting. Namely, it breaks down (by floor, even!) thus:

 

You may notice that everyone loves the 7th floor, and that the Dental school in particular loves the ever-loving-fillings out of it. It’s worth noting that they had some exams that week, which helps explains their numbers. But what’s interesting in that graph is that you can see what kind of exams they were – the kind that required solo study (notice that the quiet floors had the majority of them). In fact, this survey seems skewed toward quieter studying. I look forward to finding out what differences there are come Spring – does April encourage more group study than October? Or was it pure chance that these number shook out this way?

Of course, what’s most fascinating is when you compare the above graph with the circulation one below, and see the full picture:

It can be a little tricky to tell due to scale there, but Medical actually checked out the most that week, followed by Nutrition, and then Dental. It seems that the Dental students were really here for the studying, not the circulation. And the Medical students were most likely checking things out and then going back to the individual study rooms or learning commons – essentially showing up on one set of statistics but not the other. Although Nutrition really made the interesting difference – the circulation number is actually higher than what we counted!

This is why the middle and bottom graphs are uneven when compared to one another – people just simply move around. The library supplies space and materials, but they don’t always get used at the same time.

That wraps it up for this time. We could, of course, look at these numbers from a dozen different directions, but maybe we can save that for the next time. After all – it’s only November.

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Now that we are approaching the end of summer and creeping closer to the fall start of all of our various programs here on the Boston Campus, we here at Hirsh thought it could be a bit enlightening to take a quick look back at some of the statistics we collected from the last academic year.

A good place to start on things like this is with the broad numbers, and then narrow our way down. This past year, we counted 116,521 visitors to our library and circulated items 26,700 times! That’s fantastic! Frankly, we expect the next year to be even busier, because we keep getting new items and re-examining ways to use what we already have; all geared toward assisting you, our patrons (keep your eyes peeled here for those announcements!).

But you may find yourself wondering what the busiest months were for Hirsh. Well that’s easy enough to share. For instance: in terms of total visitors counted in our library, April was far and above the busiest month at 14,576 people. In fact, the busiest day of the year for our seating was April 9, when we counted 1,007 people here! Here, take a look at our month by month breakdown:

Monthly Stats

Kind of wild, huh? The jump from August to September is crazy (more than doubled!), but what I found really interesting was how busy we got in the fall when compared to the Spring. That right there is the difference between exams for classes and the dreaded Boards (plus, you know…class exams that let you graduate).

How does this match up against our Circulation statistics, though? Well, take a look yourself:

Circ vs Roam

 

Fewer people come to the desk than come to the library as a whole. That’s just the natural way of things. During the year, the amount of people checking things out vs using the library space at all fluctuated between 17.5% and 38%, but in general stayed around 22% – just between 1/5 and 1/4 of everyone coming here.

As you can plainly see, the circulation stats follow the same general pattern of the overall counts, but don’t quite mirror them. In fact, in terms of circulation, October was actually the busiest month, with 3,095 checkouts.

Circ Stats

Interestingly, though, October is only the busiest month for the desk. The busiest individual day was actually April 8th, at 220 checkouts even. Second busiest? April 9th, with 205. In fact, April accounts for six of the busiest ten circulation days in the last academic year. March and December split the remaining four spots equally. And despite being the busiest month, October doesn’t even appear on the busiest days list until spot number fifteen.

Go figure.

What most likely accounts for that is the way exams are spread out. During the fall, it’s steady – one a week, two a week, so on and so forth. But April is final exams, which all get packed up into the beginning of the month, where all six of those days came from. Then it falls off and gets quieter (although not Summer quiet). So April’s a bit more of a flash in the pan than October.

Finally, I leave you with these last two bits of information: when we’re busiest at the Service Desk, by weekday and by hour. So if you were ever wondering about the quietest times to come borrow books and equipment, now you’ll know!

Days of the Week

 

(Hint: not during lunch mid-week)

 

Hourly

 

Have a good summer, and we’ll see you soon!

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For the first two weeks of April, staff here at the Hirsh Library walked around and asked everyone what school they were from.  Well, we have tallied some of the results of all of that work, and have uncovered some interesting numbers!

Over the course of 13 days and 39 rounds of asking, we talked to 6,884 people. Ultimately, 2,539 of those people were from the Dental school, making that the most populous group we had in the library – a full 37% of the population of Hirsh! Medical came in at a close second of 2,373 people (a difference of a mere 166!), followed by the combined Sackler schools (PA, PHPD, and MBS) at 1,360, with Friedman rounding out at 347. The remainder was made up by staff from the Tufts Medical Center, the HNRCA, Tufts students, staff, and faculty from the other campuses, and even affiliated hospitals and schools in the Boston area. You can see the breakdown here.

School Affiliation

Now, that’s interesting data, but what does it all mean? After all, we were counting 4 times a day, so a question some people may have is “Which time was the busiest, ultimately?” Well, the answer will…probably not surprise you at all. It turns out people are much more into early lunches than they are late nights:

Times

Anyone who spends any time around the students of the different schools knows that everyone has different needs and wants when it comes to studying and getting ready for exams. It reasonably follows to assume that it means that people gravitate toward different environments – some might study better when there’s a bit of background noise, or do better in groups, whereas other people need to be alone with their books, notes, and a coffee. So which school tends to be full of which kind of person?

To begin with, it seems as though the 7th floor is the most popular floor amongst all the schools, as you can see here:

Floors 2

But the only way to get the full story is to keep going and see if you can pick out the personality types. Well, far and away it’s clear that Medical students are fans of quiet. Specifically, the quiet the 7th floor provides. Although, as you can see, it looks like if space is at a premium on that floor, people will start on the 6th and slowly work their way back down again.

Medical

The Dental school, however, appears to encourage people to look for slightly different environments. Unfortunately, we don’t have data linking school affiliation to type of seating they chose (study carrel, study room, group table, etc), but it may be a safe bet to assume that Tufts’ future dentists are by and large fans of small group study, and gravitated toward the study rooms and classrooms.

Dental

But what about Sackler? Well, it would appear that the combined programs of PA, PHPD, and MBS were mainly looking for a (relatively) quiet space to claim as their own, but that wouldn’t be quite the proper story. We unfortunately don’t have a breakdown of those three programs (vs. the “Sackler” umbrella), but it’s worth keeping in mind that the 6th floor has a very convenient classroom, and that the 7th floor has quite a multitude of small group study rooms. Perhaps those in the Sackler school are straddling a line somewhere between the Dental and Medical students.

Sackler 2

Which brings us, last but certainly not least, to Friedman students, who were not content to be quiet and alone up on the 6th and 7th floors. The students from the Friedman School of Nutrition much preferred the hustle and bustle of the 4th and 5th floors to the quiet and solitude of the others, and showed it unequivocally during the two weeks of our survey.

Friedman 2

Ultimately, with the sheer amount of data we collected (and continue to collect in other ways), it’s easy to get the answer to almost any question we may have. But the main question – the most important one that drives all of our programs and future planning at the library – is “What is it our patrons need?” Thanks to everyone’s participation in surveys and questionnaires like this one, we know that study space (and access to plugs in said study space) is absolutely vital, and we know who might be most likely to use what facilities. We’ve been learning other lessons, but today, that one is one that stands above the others.

We will continue to do surveys like this one (although perhaps not during final exams) so that we can fine tune our answers and respond to the changing needs of our community in the future.

So on behalf of the staff here at Hirsh Health Sciences Library, I would like to thank you for bearing with us and helping us learn how to serve you better. Every little bit that we can do helps, and we can’t do it without you.

PS: if you were wondering how checkouts lined up during this time period, well…it’s fairly safe to say that the need for skulls swung that pendulum in a rather specific way.

Circulation

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