Librarians have, in general, very little systematic information about activities inside their libraries. CTT is a cheap and simple method to gather such data.
It is based on regular and systematic “tours of observation” through the public areas of the library. Data gathering can be carried out by the library’s own staff rather than by consultants or hired observers.
Gaming night at Drammen Public Library.
Count the traffic
The CTTT method is known as seating sweeps in the English-speaking world. In Norwegian we have called TTT - from the expression Tverrgående TrafikkTelling (transversal traffic counting).
Its systematic use seems to have been initiated by two Canadian researchers, Lisa Given and Gloria Leckie, who used the sweeps method to study user behavior in the Toronto Reference Library and the Vancouver Public Library in 1999.
In Norway the method was first tried out at Oslo Public Library (Deichmanske bibliotek) and at Gjerdrum Public Library. Gjerdrum is a small community of 5000 inhabitants thirty kilometers north of Oslo. The second choice was easy: I live there - and am married to the library director .
Full scale TTTs have been carried out in Lillehammer 2006 (25.000) and Drammen 2007/08 (60.000). In the spring 2008 some of my students collected traffic data in more than thirty libraries. I plan to analyze the data - and publish the full data sets - before the next IFLA conference in Milan 2009.
Find links
Ongoing work will be presented through the blog Plinius/Pliny the Librarian. For easy reference I will provide links at the current page to documents in English, for international readers - and at the TTT homepage for documents in Norwegian and English, for Scandinavian readers.
E-metrics
Libraries also need to study their virtual - or web-based - traffic. IFLA Statistics and evaluation Section hopes to start an e-metrics discussion. I wrote a small paper on web traffic to national library web sites for the Quebec conference and plan to do a bit more work in this area. Initial results will be documented threough the same web pages.
LINKS
Publications
- Given, Lisa M. and Gloria J. Leckie (2003). “Sweeping” the library: Mapping the social activity space of the public library. Library & Information Science Research. Vol. 25, Issue 4, Winter 2003, pp. 365-385.
- Leckie, G.J. & Hopkins, J. (2002). The public place of central libraries: Findings from Toronto and Vancouver. Library Quarterly, 72, pp. 326-372.
TH: Documents
- Students gather in Porto. Pliny the Librarian July 15, 2008. Abstract for BOBCATSSS 2009 workshop - on students as traffic observers.
- Count the traffic. Paper for IFLA 2008. Preprint published here.
- See also Physical and virtual traffic
- How much is much? Developing and interpreting national library visitor statistics. Paper for IFLA 2008. Preprint published here.
- See also Physical and virtual traffic
- National library web traffic. Spreadsheet with supporting and additional statistics.
- PL 23/07. NTC - What happens inside libraries?. Introduction to TTT for Stellenbosch workshop in August 2007.
TH: data
An initial data set. from the first weekly cycle in Drammen (2007) is available here.The second cycle (2008) will be added later.
The headings (in Norwegian) mean:
- Dato - Date
- UD - Day of the week (ma - ti - on - to - fr - lø)
- TP - Time of the day
- OBS - name of observer [not used yet]
- ETasje - floor
- Sone - Zone
- AKT - Activity
- ANT - Number of persons carrying out the activity
