Evaluating Reference Consultations in the Academic Library
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2015, McGill University Library undertook a project to investigate, propose, and pilot test a method for evaluating the quality and outcomes of reference consultations. The goal of the project was to gather evidence to demonstrate the importance of reference consultations as part of librarians’ core contributions to the university. The evaluation tool was developed based on input from librarians, users, and a review of the literature. The evaluation was sent out to 98 users during the pilot test period. There were 53 responses to the evaluation tool for a response rate of 54%. Though preliminary, the results of the pilot test can be helpful in determining the usefulness of evaluating reference consultations, and the outcomes of engaging in assessment of this core library service. The results from this project suggest that implementing a tool to evaluate consultations can be used to inform services and to demonstrate the value of the library for research, teaching, and learning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it