Comparing libraries

GOBI	Comparing libraries From official statistics to effective strategies	NAV
	Introduction Arguing with numbers Statistics is the art of arguing with numbers. Today I discuss libraries, in the light of official statistics. They are called "official" because they have been collected by governments. But the collector does not really matter. Statistics are statistics, whether they are gathered by researchers or by public officials. The methods are similar. People tend to believe that official statistics are more authoritative than research data. This is not automatically so. We always have to evaluate the methodology used. The main difference is this: governments are bureaucracies. They have the capacity to produce statistical series: the same data are harvested every year, like potatoes. Bureaucracies are stable, like farmers. Researchers are more like hunters. When we discover an exciting animal, we organise an expedition - or a project - to kill it. This gives us food - for thought and for publication. A single data elephant can feed a researcher and her students for several years. Such projects tend to be one-shot affairs. To understand libraries better, we need to combine annual data, which tend to be more superficial, with project data, which give more detail. A balanced diet combines meat and potatoes. This lecture, however, is unbalanced. Today, you get only potatoes for dinner. The tribes of Libraria Let me start with a confession. I am not a librarian. I am in the middle of a three-year library research project. I have worked as a library teacher for thirteen years. I have taught bibliographic instruction for thirty years. But I am not a qualified librarian. My wife is a librarian. My mother was a librarian. My brother is a digital librarian. But I am not a librarian. I come from the outside. I am a statistician. When I am surrounded by librarians, I watch them closely, like an anthropologist abroad. The great Malinowski studied the tribes of Melanesia. I study the tribes of Libraria: their strange beliefs, their peculiar habits and their hesitant steps towards a digital future. Sociologists speak about communities of practice. Librarians are practical people - deeply dedicated to usefulness. Libraries are practical institutions. Their purpose comes from the outside. They exist in order to serve. But libraries are also resistant creatures: slow, ponderous, set in their ways. They carry the weight of centuries on their back. They were built as temples for the worship of books. Librarians know what is good for you. They are helpful, sweet and stubborn as nuns. Today, the veils are falling. Many librarians feel naked and exposed at the coming of the Web. In the library world I am a youngster as well as an outsider. I was recruited in 1992 - and still feel like a restless teenager. As a resident stranger I observe the library community with a benevolent, but ironic eye. Treat my blunders lightly: I am only thirteen library years old. The library profession People who count When we speak about the library sector, we must separate libraries from librarians. Libraries are organizations and librarians are individuals. We have decent statistics about libraries. I will not say we have indecent statistics about librarians. They are just very limited. Historically, the link between librarians and libraries has been very close. The social image of a librarian refers to a person - usually a woman - who works in a library. A librarian is somebody who takes care of books, who answers questions and who keeps the library in order. They are essentially defined by the work they do. To the sociologist or economist, librarian is an occupational rather than an educational category. In STYRK - the Norwegian system for classifying occupations - we find fourteen different types of librarians. Norwegian library statistics use another approach. A librarian is a person who is legally qualified to direct a Norwegian public library. This definition has a political background. In Norway, librarian is not a protected title. There is no roster of registered librarians. But all heads of public libraries are supposed to have a recognized library degree. A recognized librarian used to be defined as a person who had completed an undergraduate degree in librarianship at the School of Librarianship in Oslo. Or its equivalent. People with qualifications from abroad could apply. But approval was not a formality. A US librarian with a master in library and information science is not automatically qualified to run a small municipal library in Norway. There is an additional complication. Norway has about four hundred municipalities. Many are tiny. Nearly forty percent have less than three thousand inhabitants. In most of these small communities, libraries are run on a part-time basis. But even the part-time directors are supposed to have a professional qualification. The result is not surprising: recognized librarians stay away. They are not attracted by part-time positions in small and remote communities. The law must bend to reality. When no qualified person is available, exemptions are granted. The part-time libraries are mostly headed by people with some formal training - and lots of practical experience - but without a recognized degree (Table 1). They are not librarians in a legal sense. Study the systems The conclusion is clear: do not take statistics at face value. To understand what the "number of librarians" in a country means, you must know a bit about the way libraries and library training are organized. In order to compare countries, we must study the library systems behind the numbers as well as the numbers themselves. The symbiosis between profession and institution remains strong. But change is coming. In knowledge based economies, knowledge organization is a very useful discipline. In Denmark, half the new candidates now find positions outside the library sector. In Norway, the main library trade union has started a project to develop the job market in the commercial sector. Norwegian library statistics only cover the institution. We have some information on librarians inside libraries, but absolutely no data on their situation outside libraries. Are they gainfully employed at all? How many work as librarians? Where else do they work? What are their duties? What do they earn? This is a statistical weakness - which is becoming more and more serious. We hardly know what is happening to the profession - especially when we go beyond the library institutions. The library institution The role of libraries The countries of Europe are becoming knowledge societies. In that process the social role of public libraries is changing. In the industrial world, culture and education were secondary sectors, a bit divorced from "real work". A skilled worker was skilled for the rest of his life. We were educated before we started working - and adults enjoyed culture as a form of recreation outside working hours. In knowledge societies, production is based on constant learning and continuous innovation. Technologies and markets change rapidly. The economy needs organizations and individuals that are able to adapt, learn, develop and change. Culture and leisure have become major economic sectors in their own right. Educated people try to fill their lives with rich, intense, and meaningful experiences - both at work and in their spare time. This is a serious challenge to public libraries. Their role in industrial society was well defined. Politicians and voters understood the value of library services. Their role in knowledge societies is much less obvious. The traditional arguments for libraries have lost much of their force. Public libraries may loose their broad political support. In several European countries, I believe, this is starting to happen. The role of statistics In Norway, library statistics have become a pruning tool. In the past nobody cared. But a couple of years ago our Central Bureau of Statistics introduced a very advanced system to collect and compare municipal statistics. Suddenly, we became visible. But only lending lending was measured. Today, many administrators treat loans per inhabitant as an indicator of success – and loans per FTE as a measure of effectiveness. Both indicators may be useful. But they only cover some aspects of library work. To understand the real impact of libraries we must consider a much wider range of indicators. If their values can be computed from today`s statistics, we should do so. If not, we need better official data. When we survey library statistics, we should note the white spaces on the map. Below I give fifteen strategic guidelines. These are based on a close reading - and interpretation - of Norwegian library statistics. Most of them are valid in many other countries as well. I concentrate on public libraries, but the majority also apply to academic and special libraries. You will find a full discussion in the web paper. In the second part of my presentation I shall discuss three cases in more detail: Users and non-users The circulation of library stock The growth of net-based services Fifteen strategic guidelines Library users Count visits as well as loans. Emphasize the number of people who actually visit the library. In Norway, the number of visitors is high. Much goes on inside public libraries that is not visible from the number of loans. Keep your target group in mind. Distinguish clearly between users and non-users of libraries. Mental images are important. Libraries do not serve the general public . Ordinary library services are – almost by definition – directed towards regular users. In Norway, about half the population can be considered library users. The typical user visits the library about ten times a year – and borrows about ten books (or other items) every year. Avoid annual assessment. Look for long-term changes. Important library trends only become clear after some years. Study demand patterns – lending by medium and genre – over five or ten years. Know your customers. There are great differences in lending and other forms of library use between children, youth, adults and seniors; between women and men; and between perople in different professions. Library collections Focus on accessions. Collections need renewal. High renewal rates contributes to quality, variety and actuality - which are official Norwegian policy goals. Accessions can be measured in two ways: by the number of new items and by the budget for purchases. In Norway, close to fifty percent of all new library books are now financed by the Norwegian Cultural Council. These books are selected centrally. The purpose is to stimulate publishing in Norwegian. The effective demand for these books is highly uneven. Only books in real demand contribute to renewal in a meaningful sense. Reduce collections. Norwegian library collections are far too large – mainly because dated books remain on the shelves. This is the case in many other countries as well. In the years ahead, professional collection development will require a substantial reduction in the size of our collections. The active stock – the books available on open shelves for browsing and lending – should generally be reduced to one third of total lending. Books in normal demand should, in other words, circulate at least three times a year. In Norway, more than fifty percent of current public library collections are effectively worthless. Library services Libraries have low visibility. Develop a clear picture of how much time people spend inside your library. The more hours they spend, the more satisfied they are. They vote with their feet. Count the number of shoes – and inform your local politicians. Decision makers need mental pictures of library services that go beyond basic lending. It is not very hard to document what people do inside libraries. Simple observation methods can be used to collect convincing data. Library staff spends much time guiding and advising customers. This work will be more visible and appreciated if libraries could develop decent reference statistics. Libraries provide many services for groups of users: school class visits, book presentations, fairy tale readings, exhibitions, user instruction, lectures, concerts, etc. Take care to document them well – with quantitative and narrative data. Libraries often cooperate with schools, nursing homes, and other community institutions. "Boka kommer" [The Book comes to You] and other forms of outreach activities also belong here. Document these as well – they are part of the social networks that create a durable civic society. An increasing share of library resources are now being channelled into net-based services. We have an urgent need for meaningful virtual statistics . Three cases Case 1: Libraries do NOT serve everybody Libraries may be intended for everbody, but they are not used by everybody. The interest in libraries is strongly correlated with people`s work (Table 2). The basic tendency is not surprising: People that work with their brains, frequent libraries. People that work with their bodies, avoid them. Less than forty percent of the workers in the primary sector and in industrial occupations set their foot in a library in 2004. The most active users – after pupils and students - are people in services and people with higher education. In the past, this tendency was stronger. Only one fourth of the workers in the primary sector and in “industrial” occupations set their foot in a library in 1988. In the traditional service sector the frequency rose to forty percent. But the most active users came from the new knowledge workers: a welter of technical, scientific, humanistic and artistic occupations based on higher education. In this category, sixty percent were active library users in 1988. One dangerous trend is hidden behind the surface. We know that more and more people enter higher education. Knowledge societies depend on highly educated workers. The children of farmers and industrial workers become professionals. As the population becomes more educated, library use should, therefore, go up. But after 1993 our statistics show constant rates of lending in the population as a whole. The expected increase must be counteracted by a negative force. This can only mean that lending rates within educational subgroups are going down. Education-specific rates are in decline. Library users from the primary sector visit – on the average - the library only four times per year. This is exceptionally low. In other sectors, the actual users tend to visit the library about ten times per year. Why the difference? Is it caused by personal factors, such as education, age or sex. Is it related to characteristics of the work itself? For instance long distance to service points and lack of time for visits? Or do libraries fail to provide the services that would entice farmers, fishermen and loggers to come, read and borrow? With such questions, we move from ordinary statistics into the world of social research. Our current knowledge stops here. Norwegian official statistics are both detailed and comprehensive. But they cannot replace research projects. Governments do not catch elephants. Case 2: Take circulation rates seriously Library logistics Library collections are productive when they are used. Books are for reading. If we divide the size of the collection with the number of loans, we get the circulation rate. It shows how many times the average document has been used in the course of a year. In public libraries, the stock ought to circulate at least three times a year. If the normal loan period is one month, this means that the average book is in active use for three - and available on the shelves - for nine months every year. Books that move slowly need not be available in every local library. It is enough if they are stocked at the county - or even at the national - level. With efficient interlending, slow books are still part of the library system as a whole. Finding the proper balance between local, regional and national storage is a matter of practical logistics. If we know the service level we want, we can actually use statistical models to find the optimal distribution of documents between the first, the second and the third line of supply. Commercial distribution networks do this as a matter of course. Slow-moving stock In the library world, such thinking is hard to implement. Local libraries have a strong tendency to overstock. Librarians are justly proud of their interlending systems. But they do not really trust them. Instead they offer the customers shelves full of outdated books - just in case ... This is the case in many European countries (Table 3). But Norway - together with Iceland - is the greatest sinner. Our stocks spend only nine percent of the time with the users. This means that the documents remain immobile on their shelves for about ninety percent of the time. In terms of productivity and collection development this is an extremely poor result - and much below the rest of Europe. At the same time I note that nobody takes such conclusions seriously. Librarians and library authorities are fully aware of the data. But they do not care. In Norway, collection development is not on their strategic agenda. The matter is too technical for politicians - and maybe too unpleasant for the library profession. The users do not complain. Why should we bother? Criticizing library budgets is much more fun. The European data apply to the collection as a whole. We lack good comparative statistics for separate media types. But in Norway new media now represent one quarter of all loans. New media By new media I understand both analogue and digital multimedia, including old-fashioned audio- and videotapes. At the moment, some multimedia documents are still distributed in analogue form. But digital formats are already dominating the markedet. Analogue formats are set to disappear. New media are much more popular than books. In the country as a whole, five percent of the stock consists of new media. But these documents represent 25 percent of all loans. All the new media have much higher circulation rates than books (Table 4). All satisfy Moore`s demand: that an active document collection should circulate at least three times per year, on the average. The books, and especially the adult books, move very slowly indeed. Different readings From a strategical point of view, we can interpret Tables 3 and 4 in several different ways. We should be inspired by the popularity of new media - and use them as a model for our book collections as well. The rapid turnover of new media illustrates what public libraries can achieve if they are allowed to invest in new and attractive documents. The investment in new media is a mistake and should be reduced to a minimum. The growth of new media shows that public libraries are abandoning their real mission. We should not use public funds to finance ordinary entertainment. Libraries are meant to empower people. People should learn to read on a regular basis. They should read quality materials, and they should learn from their reading. Libraries must prepare for a future without new media. The current boom is temporary. In the near future such documents will mainly be delivered online, on demand. It is only a matter of time before broadband speeds make downloading much more convenient. Commercial publishers will not allow public libraries to provide these items for free. Libraries will in practice be restricted to materals that are distributed in physical form. We cannot use statistical reasoning to decide between the three. Statistics provide context but not political conclusions. One man`s ceiling is another man`s floor ... Case 3: Net-based services shape our future A new library mission Post-industrial society is characterized by intense and widespread use of mass media - for entertainment, for education, for work and for personal communication. On the web, in fact, the old distinction between mass media and person-to-person communication tends to disappear. Through blogs, diaries become public texts. Through mailing lists, an ordinary letter may be sent to thousands of people at no extra cost or effort. Today, all media types are converging towards a single platform: the world-wide digital web. This time, libraries must follow their customers into the new media environment. Books, journals and newspapers will remain important for the foreseeable future. But they are losing their hegemony. Libraries are media institutions. They play an important role in the distribution of print media - particularly books, magazines and journals - and are increasingly involved with electronic and digital media. The center of gravity is shifting from print to web. All institutions based on paper - banks and book publishers, mail systems and newspapers - feel the heat. They must redefine their mission and reshape their organisations in order to survive in a digital environment. The same applies to libraries. Major media trends Some major media trends are clear: we spend more of our time consuming media products we communicate more through media networks, rather than face-to-face we increasingly become producers of media content These changes are visible in our daily lives. When our computers go dark, work stops. When our cell phones go down, social life collapses. But what does this mean for the future of libraries? To understand the digital transition as a whole, we need to see it as a whole. Official statistics show us what is happening in the nation at large - and over time. Properly read, they provide a framework for strategic planning. Let us take a look at the revolution from above, through our statistical telescope. Time budgets show that electronic media are much more important than print in the daily lives of Norwegians (Table 5). Some media can be used simultaneously. People listen while they read. Some families never turn off the TV. People access the web through PCs. But the dominance of electronic media is still evident. Computers and the web Computers play a major role in ordinary life. People now spend as much time at their domestic PCs as with their newspapers. The trends are clear (Table 6). Data on media consumption go back to 1991. During the last thirteen years Time spent on print media has decreased by more than twenty percent Time spent on electronic media has increased by more than ten percent Total media time has gone up (slightly) Our media environment is changing. To remain relevant, public libraries must address tomorrow`s users. On an average day, almost half the Norwegian population links up with internet. The actual users spend, on the average, more than an hour online. Usage is still increasing. indicates steady growth since 1997, when the first statistics were collected. The differential between men and women has been reduced (Table 7). The early adopters, in the late nineties, were mostly men. Today, the ratio between female and male users has increased to around 0.75. This small difference is also likely to vanish. In the age group from 9 to 15, girls and boys are equally frequent users (Table 8). Libraries and the web Norwegian authorities treat computer skills as a new literacy. As the school leavers enter higher education around 2010, and the world of gainful work a few years later, the web will be ubiquitous - a natural component of all subjects and of nearly all occupations. This means that the library sector faces a double challenge: to provide quick and easy web access in all physical libraries to present a solid portfolio of web based services everywhere Today, computers and web access are scarce goods. Libraries take pride in every terminal added. PCs and web services are extremely popular. Queues are frequent. E-mail and web news are the most popular services (Table 9). One third of the users are looking for factual information. The day after tomorrow Tomorrow, there will be no shortage of computers or web links as such. Broadband scarsity is a short-term phenomenon. In the near future, wireless access will be a normal library service. An increasing number of visitors will bring their own portables. They do not come for the connection, however. Most households will have broadband access as a matter of course. Our homes are becoming media centres in their own right. To survive, the physical library must offer something more. We compete with private households. Ten years from now, people will only come if the physical library provides a better place for work and study, for fellowship and play. On such big issues, official library statistics are silent. We need a framework for auditing the change from paper to web. We have no decent data on library use inside libraries. My final recommendations must therefore be: Study the digital transition Study user behaviour inside libraries Develop library statistics that reflect both Conclusion Let me sum up - with seven words of statistical wisdom: Combine statistical series with survey and project data Study librarians as well as libraries We can only interpret data if we know how they are collected Statistics may describe the landscape - but they do not tell us where to go. Keep statistics at a distance - and think for yourself. Statistics should be interrogated rather than analyzed. Finding good questions is better than finding correct answers.

Tord Høivik - 2005/07/25