A Look at Book Checkouts! Library Impact Dashboard

 A Look at Book Checkouts! Library Impact Dashboards!

I have spent the last two years categorizing the picture book and reader book sections of my two libraries.  I have switched away from having the readers mixed in with picture books and NF books.  I moved them to their own section called Readers.  Both the reader section and the picture book sections are now sorted into categories.  I used the same categories for both sections.  The Readers have the Letter R added to the category label.  More about this in another post.

I have been spending time learning how to use Google Looker Studio.  It used to be called Data Studio which I was familiar with and I wrote several blog posts about that journey.  I decided to create a Library Impact Dashboard after seeing one at a conference and a virtual training session held during my Thanksgiving break.  It was worth the time!

I wanted to expand on this dashboard so I started researching what else Google Looker was being used for.  Two items stood out to me.  One a Mini Credentials board and a digital reading log.  Let’s talk about the reading log.

In both of my schools students are expected to read independently outside of school at least 15 minutes a day and some up to 20 Minutes a day.  They turn in reading logs.  I found an awesome example online.  I started to build my Google form to collect the data and the Google form to display the results.  I am worried about getting teachers to buy into this.  With Looker studio you need data to build your dashboards.  I will need to create some fake entries to get the board set up.  I’m not really into fake data so I have set this aside for a moment. Good news is that once it is set up I can delete the fake data and start collecting real data without damaging the dashboard.

Where else can I get data?  I looked at my Library Catalog and see a report for Loaned Items…… Now this report would have to be run each week or for me at the end of my 6 day rotation.  This is the biggest drawback of this report. If you don't pull the report each week you will loose out on data. All other reports that I have use so far you can pull at any time and even years later.

OPALS does not keep this information past the book being returned.  I learned about why in one of my Master Library Classes and its a good reason.  When I pull this report I will need to ensure student information is left out for this very reason. I do not want to do an end run around keeping a history of what students borrowed form the library.  OPALS has an option to leave out student information when running this report.  This report does give me some great information that I can create a dashboard with.

1. A list of books loaned out with no user information.

2. The Author names

3. Location of the books

1. Special Locations (Short Chapter books/series picture books & Reader categories)

2. The next two sections - the location field is blank and it is easy to add these after the report is pulled. 

1. Dewey - All the Nonfiction Books

2. Fiction - Novels - the longer ones - shorter ones are in Chapter Baskets

   

This gives me a look at the most popular authors & the sections of the library that get looked at the most.

1. Now to start asking questions

1. Why is an author more popular than others?  Is it the number of their books that I have?  Is it just because the author is popular?  What else can it be?

2. Which sections are seeing the most use?  Do I need to weed these sections or purchase more books for them?

The best reason to create a dashboard is to look at the data and ask questions.  The report looking nice is great but you want it to lead to questions.  I will be adding this report to the Library Impact Dashboard as a second and third page of the report.

It has been awhile since I posted!

Let's Keep Going!

Hello Everyone:

    It has been a busy couple of years.  The last time I posted it was my first year at my two school libraries in Binghamton City School District.  I was unboxing and weeding two elementary school libraries with lots of help from my fellow librarians.  I survived! 

    I have been working on a new Google Site to hold my lesson plans and all things I need to track as a professional librarian. :)  You can view my work here, but many things you won't be able to view until I am ready for them to be public.  Don't worry I won't keep them a secret for long.

I was happy to see that Data Studio is now Google Looker Studio.  I did a 4 part post about creating reading logs using Data Studio.  Now I am back creating new reading logs and even more important Library Impact Dashboards.  View here.  Since I have two school libraries I have two dashboards but I have created a blended dashboard to combine the stats to view the totals of both schools.  There is a limit to the number of blends you can create in Google Looker Studio.  I believe it is 5 but I have had issues after 4 blends.

I would love some feedback.

Tammy Cummings

Librarian

Reading Logs going digital how to and the benefits of going digital Part I

The TechWizard's Guide to Library Magic

Written by Ms. Cummings

CiTi Library Media Specialist

Reading Logs going digital how to and the benefits of going digital 
Part I

Step 1 - Create a Google Form to collect reading log data

Step 2 - Create the Public Reading Dashboard
Step 3 - create the sections of your dashboard
Step 4 - Create the Teacher Dashboard

This is part I of my journey to bringing a reading log into the digital age.  When my kids were younger they had to do reading logs all through elementary school and without fail they would get lost or have orange juice spilled on them and one even ended up in the bottom of the hamster cage!  Needless to say, they eventually made it to school and the teacher would stamp it and we start the process all over again.   As  School Library Media Specialist working in a K-12 Library I decided I wanted more to come from those reading logs.

My first step was to create a Google Form that provided an easy way for students and parents to enter the information.  I had to decide what data I really wanted to collect.  Your choices will depend on what data you and your teachers want to collect.

My form includes:

1. Automatically collect email address - this makes it easy to restrict access too.
2. First & Last names - with school student email address you may not need this I choose to include it in my data collection
3. Select one - student or adult - I want students to see adults are reading too, but you may not want to include this option
4. Grade - I am K-12 so I did Elementary, Middle School, and High School. Plus adult.  You can choose the grades you are working with.
5. Team - There are some teams in my schools.  Optional question.  
6. Book Title - ALL CAPS - this makes it easier for the system to match up titles.  You can go into the Google Sheet and correct any errors but all caps help limit the need to make corrections.  The program will count a title in all caps as different than the same title but in lower case letters. 
7. Author - at least the last name
8. Genre - I set up options for the genre and included "I can't decide" option.  You can leave this as a short answer but I don't recommend that. for the same reason as the title.  Spelling errors will cause problems so it is easier to have them select from a list
9. Abandoned or Finished - This is important to me in that all reading counts and it tells me that the student didn't like something about the book.  This helps with book recommendations and possibly tell you when a class needs a lesson on picking out just right books.  I will show you how to set it up so only finished books are counted in "Total books read".
10. Rate this book - I put in a 1-5 scale for rating the book.  This will help with the popular author and popular book part of the display
11. What is the next book you would like to read? - This doesn't appear in the display but its data I would like to have.  I have told students that they can put that they don't know what to read next.  This is also an optional question.

I had gotten this far into my creation of the Digital Reading Log and honestly, I did not really know where to go from this point.  I attended a PD on young adult books and the presenter mentioned a reading dashboard.  I got the links and viewed what they had created.  This is the link to the YouTube video Creating a Digital Independent Reading Log with G Suite Apps https://youtu.be/ASHSGiyCE68

There is also an article about the reading dashboard at this link

Honestly viewing the video and article did help get me to move forward with reading dashboard but there was so much that I struggled to figure out.

This is a lot of information to collect and you don't have to have all these items, but this data collection will provide the data for 2 to 3 dashboards.  The first and primary one is the Public Reading Dashboard.  Secondly, there is the Teacher Reading Dashboard and last, there is the Student Dashboard.  The Student Dashboard I am still working on and I will add a post for that one when I have it working.

Go ahead and create your own Google Form Reading Log and the Google Sheet to collect the data.  The sheet is created by clicking on the green box on the RESPONSES tab of the Google Form you created.  You will need this for the next part of this project.  Having the finalized form before you start the next step will be helpful, but there is a way to manage if a need to edit the Google Form occurs.  I will include tips to help you deal with those issues in the next posts.

Part II