After writing that last post, I did some more analysis of our reference desk stats (I do love having data dumps from our online knowledge base into Excel!). Did you know that over 7% of the questions we’ve fielded were answered while there was no scheduled desk coverage? Almost 2% of all questions were answered between 10 and 11 at night, and reference service ends at 10 on Sundays and Monday through Thursday. Another 2% were answered in the hour before reference services begin Monday through Friday.
These I can understand. But what’s with the average of one question per term week answered between midnight and 9AM? 9 of these 14 questions occurred between midnight and 4AM. I can tell you right now, those weren’t answered by me!