Annual Report resources: updated all year!
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Need help?
REMINDER—When contacting Adam, Katelyn, and John about annual report questions, please copy all of them on the email. This will allow us to respond as quickly as possible to your questions.
John Thompson, Director thompson@ifls.lib.wi.us
Adam Fuller, Business Manager fuller@ifls.lib.wi.us
Leah Langby, Library Development and Youth Services Coordinator langby@ifls.lib.wi.us
Katelyn Noack, Public Services Consultant noack@ifls.lib.wi.us
Annual Report Season 2024 (for 2023 report) is over. We’ll keep putting helpful tips here all year!
Top Tips for Annual Reports (from Katelyn, May 2024)
Reference Transactions
Reminder to count your reference transactions! Some libraries count all of their reference transactions with patrons and others do survey weeks throughout the year. Do you sometimes have trouble figuring out if a patron’s question counts or not? Check out this fancy new flowchart from the DPI!
The flowchart asks three easy questions to determine whether or not the interaction was a “reference transaction.” Still not sure? There are examples of common questions on the back side.
Share with your staff and post next to the circ desk for all their flowchart needs.
Library Visits
You may remember this tip from the weekly digest, but here it is again.
When counting library visits for survey weeks, staff should be counting every single person who walks into your library. This includes…
- Library Staff
- Municipal Staff
- Your Waltco Driver
- Polly Patron who needs to use the bathroom
A door counter doesn’t discern who is visiting on “official library business” and your staff shouldn’t either.
Survey Weeks
IFLS recommends a minimum of one survey week per quarter, but to get a more representative sample of who uses your library, one survey week per month is even better. Your library’s visits in May are likely different than those in January or September; so, it doesn’t make sense to use just one or two weeks out of the year to account for all the visits and help you’re giving.
Program Tracker
Finally, you may remember Leah sharing this wonderfully updated program tracker from the DPI. Now including drop-down menus to speed up your data input, you’ll thank yourself when annual report season 2025 rolls around! While your neighbor is adding their programming numbers up manually, yours will already be formatted and ready to go.