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Funding support for AskAway is provided by
BCcampus
and BC post-secondary libraries.
 

Collecting your library’s form fields data

This document provides instructions to AskAway coordinators on collecting forms fields data for their institution.

Print version (.doc) of this document.

  1. Login to the Administrator's account in Firefox
  2. Go to the drop-down box in the top right of the screen. Select Ask.
  3. Select the tab “Review Transcripts” then click on the link “Form Fields” (directly below the tabs)

Select Form Fields

  1. Month: Select the month you want from the dropdown menu
  2. Format: Click "View Excel File"
  3. Field Data: Unclick "Patron Email Domain" in the left column
  4. Field Date: Unclick "IP Address" if it's in the right column
  5. Do not use Include Labels “As Column Headings” as the tables will not print out correctly. Always use “As Table Cells”.
  6. Click the gray Submit button at the top

Delete the Practice Questions

Practice questions (such as those used for training) are included in these statistics. Follow the steps below to identify and delete them.

  1. In the Window menu, select the open Workbook
  2. Click on any data cell until the cells are white, not blue
  3. In the Data menu, choose Sort…
  4. Sort by Field 12
  5. In Field 12 (Referrer) identify and delete any rows from the Referrer: http://www.questionpoint.org/crs/servlet/org.oclc.ask.PatronChatForm
  6. If there are many rows, you may wish to use Edit>Find to search for "PatronChatForm". Use the Search by Columns option.
  7. Select and delete the identified rows (these are Practice Questions)

Add Meaningful Headings

Some of the default headings are not meaningful. As a guide, here is what we re-name these columns:

  • Field 1 > Patron Type
  • Field 2 > Location
  • Field 3 > Course
  • Field 12 > Referring Web Page
  • Fields 13 > Browser/OS
  • Field 14 > Cobrowse
  • Field 15 > Category
The “Label 1, 2 … 15” columns can then be deleted.

Identifying Mobile Users

Patrons who access AskAway using mobile devices can be identified by the word “mobile” in the Browser/OS column. Android, iPad and iPhones will be identified by their respective names, as well as by the word “mobile”. It’s a multi-step process to gather all instances of this word together. This is the most straightforward way we have found to organize the data in a way that makes it possible to interpret:

  1. Sort by the column Browser/OS. To sort, click on any cell so that nothing is highlighted. Go to menu: Data>Sort… and select Browser/OS, using the first drop-down box.
  2. Use ctrl+f (or cmd+f for Macs) to find all instances of the word “mobile” in the Browser/OS column. This indicates that a mobile device was used.
  3. Insert a column beside the Browser/OS column, and place a check beside each instance. For the service-wide spreadsheet, we have titled this column “Mobile Device Detected”.
  4. Sort by the column Mobile Device Detected. To sort, click on any cell so that nothing is highlighted. Go to menu: Data>Sort… and select Mobile Device Detected, using the first drop-down box. In the radial dial, select “ascending” (this should be the default).
  5. Use the numbers on the left side of the spreadsheet to determine the number of mobile users, and the total number of users for the month.