So I've been asked by the Adult Services department head to come up with a means to retrieve and store statistics for "Questions Answered at the Public Service Desks". Currently, they're using a pen and paper approach from a template created in Microsoft Word. Each staff member (reference librarian) at the desks (currently using the paper document) has to print out one sheet per day (therefore, the Reference Desk has 2 sheets each day, Information Desk has one sheet) and will tally (slash slash slash slash, cross) the number of questions asked, separated by hour(s) (9-11, 11-1, 1-3, 3-5, 5-9). There's also a section for notes such as "We need the following items...", "Interesting Questions", and "Suggested books/items to order".
He mostly wanted a way to reduce the paper trail and become more "green". All those papers are then returned to his desk at the end of the day. He tallies the results at the end of the month. That's approximately 3*5*4 = 60 full pieces of paper to go through to count (by hand) all of the stats, as well as read (all at once) the comments and/or notes. Granted, I don't know if he keeps a running tally (one would hope), but either way, that's a lot of unnecessary work.
Since other desks/departments may find this useful, I've extended the schema in the database that will hold the information to account for that. Although it can all be managed via a web page (and is currently working as such in skeletal form -- thank you, CakePHP and 5 minutes of time), I've opted for a better solution. Since it'd be unruly to require a webpage to be open at all times, or dealing with load-times on a webpage from a favorite or desktop shortcut, I'll be developing a dynamically created UI using Adobe Air to allow for a desktop application. All it will require from the staff member is to either click on a button (and then verify -- requested from the department head), or fill in a text box. Upon installation the application will verify which public service desk it is at and use that information from then on.
The department heads in charge of each service desk (in case any other departments wish to use this) will then be able to view reports and statistical data from a staff intranet page, as the database will be maintained on our webserver. I'll probably integrate it with
Open Flash Chart like I did on a personal project - it turned out really nice looking and was easily stylized (with a little understanding of its settings).
Hopefully when all done I can post some screenshots of the first draft of the final product. It's meant to be very simple, but nice with features...we'll have to see if I deal with connection issues to the database (as Adobe Air also has a local file store and can check on server responses). Either way, I have a lot of reading ahead of me on Adobe Air now that the database schema is complete. The statistics will come last...but we should have hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly break downs.
Posted by Brendon Kozlowski
