Patron Statistics

While employed at the Library, I became convinced that some of the methods used to report statistics could be improved. With that in mind, I began exploring data sources, and ways of aggregating it so that it could be used to better inform decisions amongst the leadership.

During any free time I got, I began developing a tool that pulled in patron data from several different systems and reported it by location.

Because the organization was a Library, the stats that are reported are pretty specific to that business model. However, the insight that it gave at a glance was something the organization had never seen before.

While most of the stats were related to how the collection was circulating, I was able to include statistics on events, and public access computer utilization as well.

Additionally, I was able to work out a method to associate addresses on record for patrons with zip codes, census blocks, and school zones so that we could evaluate how well each part of the community was using different resources.

The project was written in PHP, and made extensive use of MySQL, and JavaScript, as well as Google Maps, and Geolocation APIs. While the back-end was quite robust, the front-end left room for improvement to aesthetics.

The dashboard was embraced by the Library for a time, and I was able to present my work at the Florida Library Associate conference in 2015 under the title "Who are we really serving? Data integration strategies for libraries."

FLA 2015 Conference Program