Purpose:
To gather information about the time spent in the various categories of
work that Library staff perform.
Staff
in the libraries are involved in many tasks, often ones that cross functional
boundaries that might normally be associated with particular tasks, e.g.,
editing of bibliographic or item records (technical services function) in
one of the library divisions (normally thought of as public services).
To gain a better understanding of how staff time is distributed functionally,
rather than organizationally, a couple of ARL libraries have been working
toward a Staff Allocations Project time study that might be useful internally
in understanding the time investment in various functional library tasks. We also hope that data at the institutional
level might be interesting and useful to compare across libraries.
Dilys Morris, formerly
at Iowa State, leads the current project; Vanderbilt and Notre Dame are
trying out this study. Other large libraries have expressed some interest
in this kind of information, and ARL is watching the effort to see whether
and how it might be useful in their gathering of measurement tools.
Key to comparable and reliable data is the clear understanding and
communication of the categories of work effort that should be recorded.
Notre Dame began collecting data in early 2004; Vanderbilt is testing three weeks during
the 2003/2004 fiscal year to determine the appropriateness of the categories.
Vanderbilt Library staff
are asked to record their time in 15 minute intervals in the various product/service
centers defined for the study. The
first week for data collection was November 10-17; the second week was February 27 - March 4; the final week for 2003/2004 is June 10-16.
Recording sheets will be collected from each participating division,
and data will be entered into the software created for this purpose. Comment sheets will be collected on any and
all questions and on suggestions about where to record time, how to clarify
the categories, and how to improve the taxonomy.
By 2004/2005, the Staff Time Allocation Study should be ready for
ongoing production use. In the meantime,
the libraries at Vanderbilt will have gathered useful information and will
have played an important part in a more generalizable and comparative library
assessment tool.