Why do you ask?

2. Cultural statistics

Knowledge societies

Traditionally, statistics from the cultural sector have been scarce and scattered. National statistics have focused on the sinews of the state: population, production and economic power. But as we turn from industrial to knowledge-based societies we find that education, research and cultural activities move towards the centre of political interest. The demand for systematic information increases. National statistics on education, research and media develops in precision, coverage and detail.

In general, statistics are produced for two reasons. They occur as a by-product of systems that gather data for other purposes. In libraries, lending, stocks and budgets are typical examples. Or systems are set up specifically for the purpose. Electronic counters that register the number of library visitors are a case in point.

Library statistics

At the national level, we need a better understanding of the services that libraries provide - or could provide - in knowledge oriented, multicultural and highly complex societies. Within libraries we need better tools for planning and managing services. Well-designed sets of indicators are navigation tools. But with a caveat. Indicators that are poorly designed and poorly understood, can wreck an organization. They point to rocks rather than to the open sea.

Let us start with magnitudes. Seen from the inside, all social institutions loom large. We magnify what is close and disregard what is distant. Library staff think, talk and dream about libraries. That is normal. Institutions are more than buildings, hierarchies and products - they are arenas of concern, interest and action. To librarians, authority files and chain indexes are intensely interesting. To outsiders, they are profoundly boring.

Teachers, nurses, lawyers and parsons do the same. Every profession inhabits a social world of its own. Italians speak of campanilismo - a deep attachment to the area where the sounds of the local bell tower - the campanile -  can be heard. Professionals cling to their institutions like peasants cling to their villages.

Reference work is a small service within a small institution. I take Norway as an example, but the relative magnitudes are similar in all rich countries. Consider a random sample of one thousand employed Norwegians. Only one would be a professional librarian. A second would work in a library, but without a library education.

The two library employees would be surrounded by thirty-five persons from the educational and by seventy-five from the health and social service sector. The library sector is a tiny part of the labour market. If we take the actual numbers, the four thousand librarians and assistants in Norway would fill a small provincial town. But our 140 thousand teachers and our 300 thousand health and social workers would constitute real cities.

In Norway, there are three times as many market analysts (12 thousand), twice as many machine engineers (8 thousand) and rather more property dealers (5 thousand) than library staff. But most families see property dealers once or twice in a lifetime - while they visit the local library ten or fifteen times a year. Libraries are visible.

By law, every municipality must provide a public library. Though the sector is small, it is widely available. School and academic libraries serve people during their education. Public libraries serve people at large.  The institution is ubiquitous.

Library activities

Libraries provide many different services to many different users. But official statistics only reflect certain aspects of library use. Most of the data concern input - what public authorities put into libraries. Output data are limited to the number of loans, of visits, of  inquiries and of special events (story hours, exhibitions, concerts, etc.)

We know that the average Norwegian visits the public library five times a year - and borrow 80% of a book each time. Since we don`t distribute books by the page, many visits must involve other activities than lending. Once patrons do borrow, they take several books. Sample studies from Bergen Public Library, the second largest public library in Norway, indicate that only every third visit results in loans.

The ratio between loans and visits is the same in academic libraries: 0.8 loans per visit. People are obviously using libraries for a variety of purposes. But we have little systematic knowledge about non-loan activities.

The customers are not invisible. Inside the library we see people - most of them young - studying hard, individually and in groups. Others consult catalogs, read newspapers, write e-mail or listen to music (through headphones). Some browse the shelves, some talk with friends, some drink coffee, and some have definitely fallen asleep. But numbers and details are lacking. What is really going on - in quantitative terms?

Statistically, we know that the number of loans is tapering off - particularly loans of printed books. The share of electronic media is increasing. But even so, the main activity associated with libraries  is stagnant or in decline. I report from Norway, but hear the same story from other post-industrial countries. Lending goes down, while non-loan activities become more important.

Patterns of usage are definitely changing. But it is hard to document the change. Politicians and managers are not convinced by impressions and ad hoc reports. They demand hard data on services and activities. But it takes time, expertise and money to set up new data-gathering systems. That is why data on loans, collections and budgets are so convenient - they are collected anyhow, through the regular administrative systems.

Statistics of library use

In principle we could gather data on any library activity that can be defined and described. The technical issues are manageable. We could investigate the objective qualities and the subjective satisfactions of library use. We could report on usage patterns and user purposes. Market researchers, sociologists and statisticians  statistics have methods that would measure the true amount of studying, talking, coffee drinking and sleeping in our libraries. Marketing firms, social scientists and national bureaus of statistics conduct such surveys all the time.

But the cost of data collection and the shortage of data analysts stands in our way. Collecting and processing data is expensive. Statistics are only meaningful when they are used. The results must enter the management process, or at least the research circuit, to make sense. We should collect statistics in order to act or to understand.

Today, library institutions spend too much effort on repetitive data collection and too little on data analysis. Data collection without interpretation is simply an extractive industry: dig deep, hammer hard and pick the numbers from the rubble.  But the subsequent processing is superficial and descriptive rather than probing and analytical. Unprocessed data are as dull as unpolished diamonds.

I believe that library authorities could extract much more knowledge from their statistics if they would shift resources away from routine data collection. Today, they act like book collectors who hate to read. Library statistics gathering dust in libraries are collected in vain. The total statistical effort would be better spent on a balanced combination of simplified data gathering, focused sample studies and strategic analyses of the data.