What Are We Doing? Capturing the Uncaptured: Workload Data to Demonstrate Service

Capturing service data can be difficult, particularly for technical services and electronic resources librarians—using standard tools such as RefTracker is cumbersome, and taking more time to enter the transaction than it actually took to perform the task is an impediment to gathering good service data. The services provided by these librarians are equally as public-facing as those provided at the reference desk, but are often not captured or reported. A possible solution is to use sent e-mail as a data source for demonstrating services provided by technical services and electronic resources librarians. This lightning round demonstrates one such approach using the categorization functions in Outlook to classify, export, and report services. The data derived from this can demonstrate public-facing services and workloads related to technical services, and the method can be extended to capturing other service metrics.