There have been many changes in how libraries are recording and quantifying the work performed at the reference desk. Instead of collecting uninformative hash marks, many libraries have moved towards electronic collection of reference statistics.

The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library has begun to collect all reference transactions through the online reference tracking system, Gimlet. These numbers are aggregated and supplied to various agencies to demonstrate library impact.

Since the implementation of the online tracking system, a decrease of reference transactions has been noted. This project seeks to shed some light on this topic by comparing a series of in-person observations of the work performed at the desk to the corresponding recorded transactions in the online program.