How to Track Your Year
It’s hard to believe we’re at the beginning of another school year!
Each year we track a variety of statistics and then at the end of the year I share an infographic with my staff like the one pictured below:
It takes time to collect all of this data, and I want to remind you that I have the luxury of having two very data driven assistants who are tracking a lot this for me throughout the year, so absolutely do not feel bad about not being able to track all of the things. Track what you want, share what you want. It’s always so helpful to be able to go back and look at the data.
What I Collect
Entire classes that visit the Library
The amount of students that visit the Library just for Study Hall
Ins/Outs (basically those little visits by students who stop by throughout the day)
Database Usage
Circulation
How I Collect
I use LibraryTrac for my classes and tracking the Ins/Outs of the day. You can see a screenshot below of what that looks like. It’s great because it provides monthly reports for us!
For my study halls, students sign up via a Google Form, so it’s easy for us to count how many sign ups we have throughout the day.
Every month I have database usage reports emailed to me, and I keep their numbers in a spreadsheet.
And lastly, we can print end of the year circulation reports in Destiny, so that helps us to grab those numbers!
My assistants have been in this Library longer than me, so I inherited a lot of this tracking, but it’s been super helpful to see how my numbers have changed month to month. They keep this spreadsheet and you are able to see when I requested to start tracking some other numbers because they were significant enough to count! We stopped counting drop-ins during Covid because we really didn’t have too many and as for classes, I was teaching virtually that year, so they weren’t added here. They’ve even got data from previous Librarians so each year I try to beat their monthly number of classes!
I know that these numbers are helpful to keep fighting the good fight and are great ways to promote our Library and let our Admin know how important our Library is to our students and staff. So if you aren’t tracking data, start! Start small or big, but get those numbers!
