Text Analysis Assessment: Using quantitative text analysis to assess and improve a library service

Hear about the tools one library used to assess their virtual reference service with text analysis research by using 6 semesters of 10,000 chat transcripts. They used Voyant and Lexos software to extract words and phrases from the chat transcripts and establish word counts and frequencies, then compared the vocabularies of librarians vs. students in chat reference interviews to improve communication between librarians and their user base; findings are being applied to reference tools and resources. They used the Topic Modeling Tool, adapted from the original Mallet tool, to trace related clusters of words and perform a content analysis on the chat FAQs. Finally, a sentiment analysis using The Subjectivity Lexicon compared student and librarian sentiment. Procedures for all the text analysis techniques are presented, along with key findings and applications.