Can Academic Library Instant Message Transcripts Provide Documentation of Undergraduate Student Success?

Abstract

Instant message transcripts provide verbatim documentation of students’ expressed needs. Academic libraries fund many practices and services thought to enhance student success by meeting students’ needs. Utilizing the framework of natural experiments, Microsoft Excel conditional statements were used to mine instant message transcripts for specific occurrences of key text in order to determine the effects of changes in a limited number of academic library practices and services. A limited set of key terms were derived from an ad hoc group of librarians familiar with the San Francisco State University instant message service. Counts from the Excel conditional statements documented: the decrease in PIN requests with the implementation of a single sign-in and decreases in requests for the basic information competency tutorial, OASIS. These institutional interventions in academic library practices and services represented changes that influenced students’ expressed needs in the transcripts, illustrating the value of library-centric measures of student success.

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