Figuring it out on the Internet: statistics you will love

Citation

Maxymuk, J. (2001), "Figuring it out on the Internet: statistics you will love", The Bottom Line, Vol. 14 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2001.17014aag.001

Figuring it out on the Internet: statistics you will love

Figuring it out on the Internet: statistics you will love

Keywords: Statistics, Libraries, Planning, Forecasting, Internet

Introduction

It was an election year when Republican Congressman Charles H. Grosvenor, known as "Old Figgers", referred to ballot predictions by commenting that, "Figures won't lie, but liars will figure." Today that saying often is relayed as figures lie, and liars figure. This version places even more emphasis on the implication that determined individuals can cleverly manipulate a set of numbers to advocate just about any agenda. In Andrew Lang's famous line, they use "statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts – for support rather than illumination." The misuse of statistics can be difficult to discern. News reports of new data frequently do not supply the necessary context: Where did these numbers come from? How were they collected? When were they collected? Who was surveyed? What questions were asked and what questions were not? To use one final quotation, "statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital" (Aaron Levenstein).

Taking the persuasive and potentially misleading nature of statistics into account, library managers have an urgent need to understand and use helpful numbers for their libraries' benefit. A skillful use of statistics can help ensure both that a library gets the best possible share of the budget pie and the share is put to the best possible use. Statistics come in handy in many areas for libraries that a facility for reading them, collecting them, and finding them is essential. Dr Elizabeth Titus of New Mexico State University has even created a small Web site where she reviews publications on statistics that may be of interest to librarians (http://libws66.lib.niu.edu/libstats/other.htm).

In this column, we will examine five interrelated questions that libraries can answer with statistics:

1. 1.

   How do we measure up or rank?

2. 2.

   How should our financial resources be allocated?

3. 3.

   Is this product or service worth its cost?

4. 4.

   Are we serving the needs of the community?

5. 5.

   What are our future funding needs?

With these questions as the focus, our inquiry will center on who collects the data and where it is available on the Web.

Measuring and allocating

The first two questions go together as a pair, because they rely on the same sorts of data elements from the same data sources. The standard measurement figures come into play here: collection size, circulation transactions, reference service, staffing, and funding levels. How that funding is allocated amongst the variety of resources is potentially another type of comparison that statistics can be used to make. The most comprehensive source for this type of data is the Library Statistics Program (http://www.nces.ed.gov/surveys/libraries/) of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (http://www.nces.ed.gov/). NCES began in 1989 and includes surveys on academic libraries, federal libraries and information centers, public libraries, school library media centers, state library agencies, and library cooperatives.

NCES devises separate publications for the different library surveys. Some of these materials are available free on the Web (http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/getpubcats.asp?sid=041#050). For academic libraries, there is the biennial publication Academic Libraries. The most recent, 1996 survey was released in 2000. This survey and the 1994 version are available on the Web, as are the tables from the 1988, 1990, and 1992 surveys. The main survey product for public libraries is Public Libraries in the United States. From this, at least the tables are accessible online for the last 8 surveys dating to 1989. The last two editions of the school library survey product, School Library Media Centers, are also available online.

NCES has provided public libraries an additional tool to compare themselves more directly, named the Public Library Peer Comparison Tool (http://www.nces.ed.gov/surveys/libraries/publicpeer/). This tool allows the user to get information on a particular library and to create a peer group for that institution by selecting the variables (such as total budget and local population size) to define it. The user can then design customized reports comparing the library of interest and its selected peers according to additional selected variables. Public libraries can also get a feel for how they rank by consulting the Hennen American Public Library Rating Index (http://haplr-index.com/ratemeth.html). The HAPLR Index is based on the basic data compiled by the Federal-State Cooperative System (FSCS) of NCES for the Public Library Survey. It assigns weights to such factors as:

• •

  expenditure per capita;

• •

  per cent of the budget to materials;

• •

  materials expenditure per capita;

• •

  FTE staff per 1,000 population;

• •

  periodicals per 1,000 residents;

• •

  volumes per capita;

• •

  circulation per hour, visit, FTE staff hour, and capita;

• •

  reference per capita.

Interlibrary loan measures are not included and neither are Internet usage figures.

Large academic libraries are served further by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), which has collected and compiled annual statistics for member libraries since 1962 (http://www.arl.org/stats/arlstat/). Prior to 1962, James Gerould of Minnesota and later Princeton collected data from 1907 to 1962 on selected university libraries. These historical Gerould Statistics are linked to from the ARL site (http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/gerould/). ARL publications are particularly good for time-series on such elements as monograph and serial costs, service trends, expenditure trends, and resources per student. The introduction, graphs, and tables for the last three editions are available on the Web, as are the machine-readable data files that are downloadable in spreadsheet format. Likewise, a whole series of 30 developing indicators based on ratios are posted. Examples are:

• •

  expenditures for library materials as a percentage of total expenditures;

• •

  salary expenditures as a percentage of total expenditures;

• •

  number of faculty per library staff member;

• •

  expenditures for serials per student.

Furthermore, ARL also provides online access to, at least, some of its other survey instruments: the ARL Annual Salary Survey (http://www.arl.org/stats/salary/), ARL Preservation Statistics (http://www.arl.org/stats/pres/) and statistics from law and medical libraries (http://www.arl.org/stats/lawmed/).

Still another resource for academic libraries is the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). ACRL produces Academic Library Trends and Statistics with data from over 1,000 institutions and makes summary reports available on the Web (http://www.ala.org/acrl/statshp.html). These summary tables include high, low, median, and mean figures for selected data elements and are a nice supplement to the above figures.

School library media centers are served by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) in addition to the aforementioned NCES survey. The AASL statistical page (http://www.ala.org/aasl/factsfigures.html) has links to additional online data sources, such as School Library Journal and Education Week. For special libraries, the well-known SLA Salary Survey is not available freely on the Web, nor are any sort of other statistical measures.

Value

The third question statistics can help address is whether a particular service or product is worth what the library is paying for it. Admittedly, value is a difficult thing to measure accurately or perhaps at all. How do you go about measuring the integration of technology into library? What kind of impact does that have on your users? Obviously, a great deal of the information needed for this sort of study is going to be internal data generated by the library itself.

Whether dealing with the costs of serials, distance education or the move to digital formats, determining value generally calls for a cost-benefit analysis. There are a great many articles on cost-benefit analyses in the library literature (namely, some right here in the Bottom Line), but the Web can be of use here, too. Good examples of completed studies can be located online. The February 2000 issue of D-Lib Magazine included "The Costs of Print, Fiche, and Digital Access: The Early Canadiana Online Project" (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/kingma/02/kingma.html) by Bruce Kingma. Michael Lesk has put up another interesting study, "Substituting Images for Books: The Economics for Libraries" (http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/unlv/unlv.html). One final example is "Measuring the Cost Effectiveness of Journals: The Wisconsin Experience" (http://www.arl.org/newltr/205/wisconsin.html) published in the ARL newsletter.

Serving the needs

Cost-benefit analysis leads into the fourth question regarding serving the needs of the community, but to answer such a question, a library has to be able to measure who their community is and what their needs are. Much of this requires macrodata of the type typically found at the Bureau of the Census (http://www.census.gov/). Among a plethora of questions, a library may need to know:

• •

  What is the population of the community broken down by age, race, education, and income level?

• •

  What other languages are spoken in the community and by how many?

• •

  Who are the major local employers and industries?

• •

  How many home-based businesses are there?

• •

  How many children are home-schooled?

An excellent guide to answers to these and many other questions is the Colorado Library Research Service's page on Community Analysis Resources (http://www.lrs.org/html/community_analysis_resources_o.html). Although some of the resources are geared toward solely Colorado information, much of it is not. This is a good guide to start on the issues covered by government data.

Future planning

What this all leads to of course is planning for the future. Library managers need to know what their service and material needs are likely to be in the future. A key is to know what funding levels will be necessary to carry out those plans. A page put together by the Indianhead Federated Library System in Wisconsin is very helpful in this area (http://ifls.lib.wi.us/). Indianhead is a multi-county organization of Wisconsin public libraries and some of the information here is of interest only to member libraries, but there is also information on cost of living, minimum wage, and postage rates. More interesting is the data compiled from School Library Journal and American Libraries on average prices for books, magazines and media.

The Colorado Library Research Service also has a page on Planning Resources (http://www.lrs.org/html/more_planning_resources_on_the.html). Again some of the resources featured are of local interest, but from this page a user also can connect to inflation calculators, wage calculators, and dollar conversion calculators as well as studies on Internet costs and cost models. There are certainly many more questions that will arise in the library where some accurate numbers are needed to provide the best possible solution. Many of the figures a library might require are on the Net. The sites noted above should provide a good start.

Comments on this column are welcome and can be sent to maxymuk@crab.rutgers.edu. Or visit my Web page (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~maxymuk/home/home.html). Links to Web sites referred to in this column can be found there.

John MaxymukReference Librarian at the Paul Robeson Library, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA