Statistics in Practice: Measuring & Managing, Proceedings of the IFLA Satellite Conference, Loughborough, August 2002

Citation

Henczel, S. (2004), "Statistics in Practice: Measuring & Managing, Proceedings of the IFLA Satellite Conference, Loughborough, August 2002", Library Management, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 153-154. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120410522398

Having just returned from the 2003 IFLA Satellite Conference on Performance and Evaluation held at Northumbria University in Durham, UK, where I met many of the contributors to this collection of papers, I was very pleased to have the opportunity to review the proceedings of the 2002 conference. As well as making me aware of what I had missed by being unable to attend in 2002, it reinforced my view that this is an extremely valuable international conference for everyone interested in the practical application and outcomes of measurement and evaluation. The 2002 conference was held at Loughborough University and hosted by the Library and Information Statistics Unit (LISU), a national research and information centre based at Loughborough University. It was supported by the IFLA Statistics Section.

Measurement and evaluation have become a necessary part of our lives as library managers, and consequently we are seeing a rapidly increasing range of publications emerge on measurement methodologies, statistical analysis and evaluation techniques. We are also seeing the emergence of commercial products and programmes that are designed to help us to measure locally and benchmark nationally and internationally. Conferences such as this one provide a valuable forum for practitioners and vendors to discuss their issues, methodologies and solutions and to learn from one another.

Statistics in Practice: Measuring & Managing focuses on the practical application of quantitative methods in library management: 14 papers, three workshop summaries and six poster summaries cover the practical applications of statistics and performance indicators to library management in all sectors. The papers, presented by local and international presenters, cover academic, public and special libraries and show how statistics have been utilized in real‐life situations to inform management and support decision making. Patricia Layzell Ward’s introduction on the teaching of statistics in library schools (or rather the lack of it) presents us with a common scenario – as library managers we are expected to measure, yet statistics (and associated analysis skills) are rarely part of our library school training. She discusses the implications of this for the profession, the accreditation bodies and professional associations. Steve Hiller, Anja Smit, Joan Stein and Wanda Dole each focus their presentation on the use of statistical data in academic environments – using statistical data for decision making (Hiller), using statistics to enhance library performance (Smit), measurement‐based change (Stein) and statistics‐based method to allocate academic library materials budgets (Dole). David Lightfoot and Don Mills give examples from the public library sector such as service improvement (Lightfoot) and overall organizational effectiveness (Mills). An example from the special library sector is provided by Sebastian Mundt (sampling to monitor in‐library use). The final two papers cover the measurement of e‐resources. Tony Kidd provides an update on Project COUNTER and Julia Blixrud on the ARL E‐metrics project. John Sumsion concludes by giving his personal overview of library statistics, taking the “bottom‐up” approach.

The three workshop summaries provide a description of a workshop that was conducted by LISU directors aimed at demystifying statistics by developing an appreciation for performance indicators and statistics and examining the different types of statistics and their practical applications.

Summaries of the poster sessions, which highlighted projects and products, are also included in the proceedings.

The proceedings of this conference, and indeed those from past and future conferences, make a valuable contribution to the dissemination of work done by library managers to measure and evaluate the outcomes of their programmes and the usage of their services to support management decisions. I look forward now to seeing the proceedings of the 2003 conference!