Where Do We Go from Here? Informing Academic Library Staffing through Reference Transaction Analysis

Bradley Wade Bishop is Assistant Professor, College of Communication and Information, University of Tennessee, [email protected]. Jennifer A. Bartlett is Head of Reference Services, University of Kentucky Libraries; e-mail: [email protected]. The authors would like to acknowledge the University of Kentucky Libraries, University of Kentucky Regular Summer Faculty Research Fellowship award that funded this study, as well as the external raters that assisted with interrater reliability testing. © 2013 Bradley Wade Bishop and Jennifer A. Bartlett, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC This study conducted a systematic sample of every 70th reference transaction from over a three-year period and analyzed 1,852 reference transactions asked at an academic library system’s fifteen face-to-face (f2f) service points as well as via telephone, e-mail, and chat. Findings indicate two-thirds of the total questions asked were location-based questions about the library. Also, 80.2 percent of location-based questions and 77.2 percent of subject-based questions were asked f2f. Analysis of location-based reference questions informs effective deployment of librarians and staff at library service points as well as the development of mobile library apps.