BackTalk: The Stat Factor

As an undergraduate arts student, I frequently directed derision at the science students who were required to complete a compulsory statistics course. In turn, the science undergraduates, who shared this painful bonding experience, regularly heaped scorn on arts students for bypassing this miserable training. Little did I know that while I laughed, I was also setting myself up for years of frustration with the formulas and numbers known to librarians as “monthly/yearly statistics.”

Looking back, I'm amazed that I got through four years of undergraduate and two years of graduate school without somehow engaging with statistics—much less taking a statistics course. I'd heard mentions of statistics in my first year as an undergraduate student, and I read the word statistics many times during my library school education. But I was never required or even asked to study them, and I developed no skills whatsoever in collecting, collating, compiling, or, most important, using them.

I can only imagine the ghastly sighs of library managers everywhere when they read these words. No training in the lifeblood of our funding? No experience with the principles of massaging raw data into spreadsheets with which we can shock and amaze all interested or disinterested (but necessary) parties? I also imagine all those undergraduate science students now nodding their heads in a collective “told you so!”

Truth be told, I wish that I had been forced to study statistics at the university level. It's like a noticeable gap in the professional education of librarians. As a library professional, I am regularly exposed to such disturbing words as multiple regression correlation, quantile, quartile, quintile, two-way analysis of variance, and the ever-present confidence interval for a proportion.

In fact, the sheer dominance of statistics in the life of a librarian can be stunning to the uninitiated, especially considering how much effort is put into capturing data on services libraries provide—the patrons, circulation, and programs—versus the effort that goes into actually delivering or fine-tuning those services.

Yet, while I was well prepared after library school to handle reference interviews, I was totally unprepared to deal with the massive quantity and the importance of statistics. If statistics are such a necessary, and some might argue healthy, aspect of library administration, shouldn't we consider making graduate programs for librarians at least cover statistics?

I have, at last, slowly begun to study and understand statistics. And now I can't help but hold out hope for a better, predominantly qualitative method of measuring and reporting monthly and yearly library activities.

I don't deny the importance of gathering and using data to provide a quantitative basis for understanding libraries; however, I question the amount of time I spend preparing monthly and yearly reports dominated by statistics versus the amount of time I spend planning and implementing the actual program elements on which I am reporting.

Obviously, the way each library collects data and reports monthly and annually varies widely. But are all librarians so occupied with collecting and reporting statistics?

As I struggle with the need regularly to harvest numbers, I often think about a patron in our library who would speak to me about her now-defunct garden club. She explained, with growing frustration, how she spent more and more time on paperwork over her years with the group, until it dawned on her one day that she was actually spending significantly more time preparing club documents and mailing letters than she was gardening. I sympathize.

The basic issue my patron encountered with her club is an issue faced by many volunteer organizations: how best to balance administrative work and “actual” work. Of course, for volunteer organizations, the key element is getting together to engage in whatever interest or activity the organization is founded on. The garden club, faced with more administrative work than gardening, eventually disbanded. Members now meet informally, side-stepping the need for things like insurance and agendas.

Libraries, of course, have no such luxury. We are publicly funded and publicly administered institutions. We have a mission and a responsibility to provide services but also to be accountable and fiscally responsible for those services.

Still, as I find myself more and more burdened by statistics, I have to wonder: Is this the nature of the beast, or is there any alternative that would allow librarians to care a little less about statistics while still providing high-quality services in a fiscally responsible manner?