German Librarians' Conference: Use and Abuse of Statistics

P. Büning, Düsseldorf
J. Kreische, Düsseldorf
K. Südekum, Würzburg
S. Mundt, Stuttgart
A. Knapp, Karlsruhe

Rather than writing individual posts on all of the talks on the topic of statistics, it seemed to make sense to put it all into one post.

At the center of this talk was the German library statistical rubric BIX (Bibliotheksindex). It's a voluntary tool used to make comparisons between public and academic libraries. Everyone seems a bit critical of the rankings, since as one speaker put it, they are easy to misinterpret. The stated purpose of BIX is to make library performance and evaluation transparent and accessible to politicians and administrators.

Ms. Brüning in particular was critical of what she called Kennzahlen, which loosely translates to undigested statistical figures, e.g- how much you spend on acquisitions. She noted that in the hands of the inexperienced, one can draw many false conclusions.

Mr. Kreische pointed out an example where a BIX figure makes it appear that in his library the amount of instruction is increasing. However, a more complex analysis makes that a dubious assertion, since different calculations with different figures--not used in BIX--simply account for more variables. He showed a chart of statistics (with frequency) that his library collects, and only a few of them had direct influence on the BIX system. He pointed out another area where the numbers that other libraries had reported were clearly incorrect [sounds like ACRL statistics to me], since they showed a higher number of active borrowers than the number of potential borrowers.

BIX uses the numbers of hours open per week as a number in their rankings. He pointed out, however, that a better number would be the number of hours per year. His library is open 350 days per year, while others (who had higher weekly figures) were open far fewer days and thus had lower opening hours per year.

Mr. Mundt pointed out that there are three typical types of comparison instruments: institutional comparison (quantitative), ranking, and benchmarking. In light of that, BIX is something of a mixture of all of these, more a ranking than benchmarking, even though many want to see it as a benchmarking tool. [Incidentally, ranking and benchmarking are now 'German' words.]

He then outlined the demands of various stakeholder groups, i.e.- who cares about this information in the library world. For one, our funders, who need to know how to divvy up the cash and want to see improvement. Beyond this, they want to see our relevance and want us to have a positive image. Users want to have open channels for dialog, and would like to know when changes impact them. The general public needs to know about the tasks and roles of libraries, in terms of being service and cultural institutions. They also want to know about current developments and innovations.

Libraries always have a "on the one hand, on the other" view of this. For example, we want to be able to compare ourselves to others, but we want also to highlight how unique we are. Also, we want data to show our innovations and changes, but also reflect a certain longterm view.

In his conclusion, he pointed out that the needs of external bodies are not addressed by a system such as BIX, i.e.- no information is provided regarding the relevance or position of libraries in general.

In the Q&A, Mundt mentioned that one positive benefit of a system such as BIX, aside from everything else, is that it brings libraries into a discussion of such issues.