{"closest_prior_art":[{"name":"NC State Library Reference Transaction Patterns project","overlap":"Uses multichannel reference-transaction logs to identify time-of-day patterns relevant to staffing; retains granular chat timestamps and queues and applies rules excluding extremely short or long sessions.","remaining_difference":"It analyzes transaction patterns and fixed-time summaries rather than reconstructing active-attention, concurrency, and waiting trajectories with explicit abandonment, handoff, outage, and service-boundary events or comparing multiple sampling cadences.","source_ids":["SRC1"]},{"name":"Empey reference-desk transaction analysis","overlap":"Measures when reference interactions occur, their duration categories, and question types, and uses the results to change reference-service hours and increase collection detail.","remaining_difference":"It uses categorized transactions and duration bins, not a piecewise-continuous workload representation, concurrency or accumulated waiting measures, boundary-event rules, or masked comparative staffing judgments.","source_ids":["SRC2"]},{"name":"LibAnswers analytics plus Genesys chat-concurrency workforce management","overlap":"LibAnswers supplies multichannel library records, turnaround and peak-load reporting, queues, routing, and privacy controls; Genesys converts historical chat volume, handle time, and concurrency into staffing requirements while removing overlapping hold time to estimate agent effort.","remaining_difference":"The sources do not disclose the proposed library-specific combination of de-identified cross-channel attention and waiting trajectories, librarian-adjudicated passive-session rules, native abandonment/handoff/outage boundaries, cadence sensitivity tests, and retrospective comparison against count-based coverage judgments.","source_ids":["SRC3","SRC4"]}],"contrastive_claim_falsifier":"The claim is falsified if, on masked held-out periods, transaction counts or duration-weighted counts produce coverage judgments as reproducible as the piecewise-continuous representation; reviewed allocation differences disappear or reverse under reasonable five-, fifteen-, and thirty-minute cadences or passive-session caps; or explicit abandonment, handoff, outage, opening, and closure boundaries add no decision-relevant information.","contrastive_claim_remaining":"In reference-service scheduling, jointly representing active attention, concurrency, and waiting as within-interval trajectories while terminating interpolation at adjudicated service events will produce stable, librarian-reviewed coverage differences that transaction counts, duration-weighted counts, and fully smoothed forecasts do not reproduce.","experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp13_second_slot_policy60_20260806","gates":{"adequate_source_search":{"rationale":"The bounded search covered the proposal directly, reference-desk and virtual-reference terminology, operational products and practices, and the component combination of duration, concurrency, waiting, workload, and staffing. Four opened sources span four publishers and include primary operational research and first-party product documentation. No exact phrase match was treated as novelty evidence.","source_ids":["SRC1","SRC2","SRC3","SRC4"],"status":"PASS"},"bounded_next_test":{"rationale":"An eight-week, single-unit, at-most-three-channel retrospective comparison is bounded and measurable. Existing work demonstrates that reference logs can contain channel, timestamp, duration, queue, peak-load, and turnaround information, while the test explicitly examines cadence, missingness, passive-session assumptions, boundary errors, and reviewer agreement without changing schedules.","source_ids":["SRC1","SRC2","SRC3","SRC4"],"status":"PASS"},"distinct_testable_claim":{"rationale":"Prior work separately uses transaction timing and duration for library staffing and concurrency-adjusted workload for contact-center staffing, but the proposed claim distinctly predicts stable allocation differences from a library-specific hybrid trajectory-and-boundary representation and supplies explicit comparative falsifiers.","source_ids":["SRC1","SRC2","SRC4"],"status":"PASS"},"no_obvious_safety_or_authority_stop":{"rationale":"No retained source reveals an inherent safety or authority prohibition on retrospective workload analysis. The proposed read-only, de-identified design, exclusion of message content and individual scoring, librarian adjudication, privacy-officer approval, and manager-retained staffing authority address the evident privacy and governance risks; Springshare also documents PII-scrubbing and data-minimization features.","source_ids":["SRC3"],"status":"PASS"},"supported_problem":{"rationale":"Library evidence shows that staffing decisions are commonly informed by transactions summarized by hour, day, month, channel, category, or duration bin; one operational dataset could not resolve email below monthly totals and had to cap implausibly short and long chats. Duration variation and cross-channel differences are visible, while adjacent workforce-management practice confirms that concurrency can materially change inferred effort. Direct evidence that these limitations actually reverse library coverage decisions is not yet supplied.","source_ids":["SRC1","SRC2","SRC3","SRC4"],"status":"PASS"}},"prior_art_disposition":"ADJACENT_PRIOR_ART","problem_evidence":{"finding":"The representational problem is partly visible: reference-service data are used for staffing yet are often transaction-based, binned, channel-inconsistent, and sensitive to session-duration rules; empirical studies show material variation in interaction duration and timing, and adjacent workforce-management systems explicitly correct workload for concurrent chats. The retained evidence does not establish that a piecewise-continuous model would change library staffing decisions for better reasons.","source_ids":["SRC1","SRC2","SRC3","SRC4"],"status":"PARTLY_SUPPORTED"},"research_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp13_light_screen_20260806","schema_version":1,"screen_id":"E13P133","screen_survival":true,"search_lanes":{"component_combination":{"no_result_note":"No retained result described the full library-specific combination of active-attention and waiting trajectories, concurrency correction, discrete abandonment/handoff/outage boundaries, and cadence comparison; cross-domain workforce management implements the closest concurrency-adjusted staffing component.","queries":["library reference service staffing transaction counts duration concurrency wait time workload scheduling","virtual reference service concurrent chats staffing workload duration","\"piecewise\" \"reference service\" workload library staffing","How chat concurrency works in workforce management"],"source_ids":["SRC1","SRC2","SRC4"]},"direct_problem_and_intervention":{"no_result_note":"Direct searches found transaction analyses and granular operational reporting, but no direct implementation of the proposed piecewise-continuous hybrid workload model for reference-service coverage.","queries":["reference desk staffing hourly transaction counts scheduling library queue waiting","library reference desk staffing schedule transaction counts by hour study","Piecewise-Continuous Workload Modeling for Reference-Service Coverage"],"source_ids":["SRC1","SRC2"]},"products_practices_and_standards":{"no_result_note":null,"queries":["site:springshare.com LibAnswers reference analytics duration timestamp staffing","site:libraryh3lp.com reports chat wait time duration concurrent staffing","library reference statistics standard transactions duration referrals wait time","site:imls.gov public libraries survey reference transactions definition time duration"],"source_ids":["SRC1","SRC3","SRC4"]},"synonyms_and_historical_terms":{"no_result_note":"Searches under reference-desk statistics, transaction analysis, virtual reference, handle time, busy periods, workload forecasting, and staffing requirements found adjacent practices but not the complete intervention.","queries":["reference transaction analysis staffing duration time of day library","informed desk staffing quantified reference statistics","virtual reference workload handle time busy periods staffing requirements","reference service transaction granularity session duration"],"source_ids":["SRC1","SRC2","SRC3","SRC4"]}},"sources":[{"claims_supported":["Reference-transaction trends are analyzed to inform staffing decisions.","Data granularity differed by channel: email could be monthly-only, while later chat data included date, time, and queue and in-person or phone data used hour-level bins.","The analysis excluded chats of ten seconds or less and over one hour to address duplicate or passively open sessions, demonstrating sensitivity to session-boundary rules."],"publisher":"NC State University Libraries","source_id":"SRC1","source_type":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","title":"Library Reference Transaction Patterns: Visualizing Library Usage Data","url":"https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/dataviz/visreference"},{"claims_supported":["A library analyzed reference transactions by occurrence time, duration, category, sources used, and instruction provided.","Observed transactions varied in duration and were concentrated in particular weekday and daytime periods.","The findings led to reduced service hours and more detailed ongoing data collection."],"publisher":"Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research","source_id":"SRC2","source_type":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","title":"Transaction Analysis of Interactions at the Reference Desk of a Small Academic Library","url":"https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/1183"},{"claims_supported":["LibAnswers records reference statistics and aggregates email, SMS, chat, web-form, and social-media questions.","Its first-party documentation describes per-channel reporting, turnaround-time and slow or busy-period analytics, queues, routing, and reference-pattern analysis.","The product documents patron-data encryption, PII scrubbing, and configurable data collection."],"publisher":"Springshare","source_id":"SRC3","source_type":"FIRST_PARTY_PRODUCT","title":"LibAnswers","url":"https://www.springshare.com/libanswers"},{"claims_supported":["Genesys Workforce Management uses historical volume and average handle time and accounts for chat concurrency during staffing-requirement generation.","It removes overlapping hold time from concurrent chats to estimate actual agent effort or focus time.","Staffing requirements adjust as historical concurrency patterns change."],"publisher":"Genesys","source_id":"SRC4","source_type":"FIRST_PARTY_PRODUCT","title":"How chat concurrency works in workforce management","url":"https://help.genesys.cloud/articles/how-chat-concurrency-works-in-workforce-management/"}],"world_novelty_boundary":"This bounded public-web screen found adjacent library transaction-analysis practices, multichannel reference analytics, session-duration cleanup rules, and cross-domain concurrency-aware workforce management, but no close match for the complete proposed hybrid representation and validation protocol. That absence establishes neither world novelty nor patentability and says nothing conclusive about market size, expert acceptance, realized value, unpublished implementations, proprietary analytics, patents not surfaced by these queries, or literature outside the bounded terminology and sources searched."}