New Patron Statistics

All, I was asked by a library to look at some oddities in their patron stats. The number of patrons added in any given month changed over time if the report for that month was run again at a later date. I looked at all the reports and learned something about the way we have been gathering our patron statistics. All the libraries have been using running the patrons added report which is based off a template I created. The only problem is this template is not necessarily counting the wrong thing but it is doing it in a way that allows for the numbers to change over time. The easy answer is the report we have been using is the wrong one. Skip to the last paragraph for the easy solution. For the full explanation read on. I’ve attached a spreadsheet to demo some of what I’ve found, so print it up, grab a cup a tea and let’s go. There are 4 problems with the template that the libraries have been using. (A thank you to Soul Coastal for agreeing to be our guinea pig.)

Problem #1
The template is missing some new profiles. The report template as I originally created only included the profiles, ADULT, J-NONRES, J-NRPO, JUVENILE, NONRES, NRPO, STAFF AND TEMPORARY when your report was originally run in July of 2006 that was enough. In the fall of 2006 we broke out the juvenile profiles to allow for the tiers. The report template was not modified so the profiles, J-NONRESNO, J-NONREST1, J-NONREST2, etc. are not being counted. As you can see on the spreadsheet, that accounts for a difference of 26 users for the month of June 2006. That still leaves 10 users unaccounted for, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Problem #2
We are counting the wrong statistic. By counting the number of users who have had their privilege granted in the month of June we were lumping in the number of patrons who have had their privileges renewed. Instead we should be looking at the number of users who were created in the month of June. This is what Director’s Station is doing. You can see in the spreadsheet that if we compare the months of June 2006 and June 2007 in Workflows and DS they match when we select on the user created date. The only problem I had was I could not reconcile those numbers. Theoretically then the number of users whose privilege was granted in June minus the number of users who were renewed should equal the number of users created but it doesn’t and I think that is because there may be users who were renewed in other libraries. Either way the number will not work out and part of that over time is caused by Problem #3.

Problem #3
The temple is counting the users currently in the database. This report is a Current User Statistics report, so it is looking at the patron database and giving us a count by user profile of all users currently in the database. As we saw in Problem #1, there were 26 users left out because of their profiles. The other 10 as far as I can tell have been removed from the database at the library. In June of 2006, according to workflows, the remove user command was used 8 times. It would have been nice if it was 10 times and then we would have a match, but as it is that still leaves us with only 2 users out of 637. Not a bad margin of error (.3%). The problem we have is we cannot get a report, after the fact, of who was removed so we don’t know for sure if these 8 people were all created in that same month. That being the case it is not a stretch to say the other 2 users could have been removed in some other month. In total the remove user command was used 87 times in the library. So we can see that the database is not a good source for our statistical numbers as it is in a constant state of change. This leads me to Problem #4.

Problem #4
I was using the wrong report. The templates that I set up and have been using in Workflows and Director’s Station are not the best means of getting historical numbers. I see that now and probably should have put 2 and 2 together. We have two options for our numbers. We can pull our numbers from the databases themselves, number of patrons, number of items, etc. We can also pull numbers from the statistical logs that Unicorn generates. This is how the circulation numbers are arrived at. These transaction logs are written to every time a command is used in Unicorn. In the case of creating a new user that command is designated by the letters JY. These numbers should not change over time, as once the log is written to, it stays that way. This is how we can see how many users have been created (JY), renewed (RY) or deleted (FY). When we run a transaction report for the month of June 2006 we get 424. Compared to the result from the User report of 398 we’re left with a difference of 26 users, who probably were either deleted or had their accounts set to LOSTCARD some time over the course of the year. I’ve created new templates for all the libraries. It’s called [lib name] Month Users Added. It is based on a transaction log and will give you the number of times your staff has used the create user command. This coupled with the report [lib name] Month Deleted Users and the report I send out each month counting the expired users I removed will give you a count of how many patrons were added in that month. I would also check your circ reports and make sure that they include the new juvenile profiles as well as the new Sussex Tech profiles or else you could be shorting yourself of those statistics.