A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities compares two library branches during exam week, finding a week-ahead demand forecast sharply cuts turn-aways at the branch that adopted it while the campus-wide total barely changes.
An eight-day exam-week study finds one branch's forecast-led allocation cuts its own turn-aways, while the campus-wide total barely moves
A week-ahead demand forecast can cut a library branch’s own laptop turn-aways by more than half — without necessarily shrinking how many students go without one campus-wide, a new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities finds.
Two branches of Slop University’s loaner-laptop scheme parted ways this exam period: one adopted a week-ahead forecast that pre-positions stock before the rush, while the integration at the other stalled, leaving its desk to keep allocating by feel, as it always has. Researchers tracked sign-outs and turn-aways at both across the eight busiest days of the exam timetable, drawing on the same shared pool of laptops.
A forecast that only serves one desk has already made a decision about whose turn-away counts. We’d like to know whether the queue actually shrank, or just changed address.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Marek Solheim, whose work traces initiatives that quietly stop rather than formally end, called the stalled rollout at the sister branch “the more familiar half of this story — the forecast that never technically failed, because it was never quite finished.”
The comparison is being read across the School as confirmation that anticipation, done well, still has to reckon with where its benefit actually lands. The pool of laptops remains shared between both branches; Library Services says it is reviewing whether one forecast, rather than one applied only where the integration succeeded, could serve them together.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.rssr33.