Re: Forms, Etc

[Sara Kimball <skimball@uts.cc.utexas.edu>]

I'm at some level an anti-b too, though I've had to become one to 
survive and prosper, and as I'm trying to pull together 
course material for the course I'm teaching with a friend from Classics 
on Hittites and Mycenaeans, I realize that many of the texts we both 
study are b. detritus (*all* of the Mycenaean ones are), and I 
figure as I generate more and more paper, that I could be making a 
contribution to scholarship many millennia hence. ;-)
	More seriously, statistics have been crucial to our getting and 
keeping our funding, and we're especially concerned with demonstrating 
that we serve all undergraduates from all colleges in the university in 
roughly the proportions in which they're enrolled. We keep information on 
a Filemaker Pro database.  It's taken by person sitting at the reception 
desk, who also functions, inter alia, as official greeter and intial 
friendly face.  For each 
visit, we record information like what the student wanted to work on, 
what was worked on, the instructor's name and the assignment.  The 
consultant writes a brief description of work done in the session, and 
that can be transferred to a different form that becomes a note that is 
printed and sent to the teacher if the student wants us to.  On students' 
first visits we take some basic demographic information, such as the 
student's college, year in the university, how (s)he heard about us and 
the student's gender (the latter we don't ask).  I designed the basic 
system myself, but at the beginning of the summer, Xavier, our 
administrative assistant revised it pretty thoroughly and streamlined it, 
taking out the Kimball-derived Rube-Goldbergesque aspects.  It's 
now all electronic, for example, and it seems to be working very well.  
Of course as a reward for his efforts, Xavier now gets to document it.
Sara Kimball
UT Austin
(Who is too tired to spell the b-word even enought to look it up).

On Mon, 5 Aug 1996, Latisha LaRue wrote:

> Linda,
> 	Hmmm well as a staunch anti-beurocrat:) I'm nearly inclined to
> agree with you.  But tutors fill out what the clients/writers need?  I'd
> be afraid they were putting in their own words the needs of the other.  I
> prefer to have those who avail themselves of our services state their
> needs in their own words.  And can you imagine the data base if no forms
> whatsoever are used?