Introduction

There is a tsunami of literature on the need to demonstrate the value of libraries, and what to measure to achieve that goal. The driving force behind the production and consumption of this literature is the growing consciousness of the impact of the digital age on the library business model.

This comment was a response to the announcement that all staff at the University of Sydney Library were being made redundant, and would need to reapply for their jobs under a new staffing structure that is likely to result in some staff not being re-employed. It is a very dramatic turn of events, and something that many librarians at Sydney University probably thought would never happen.

While this is not a book about the strategic directions libraries should take, the journalist’s comments do raise two issues that are absolutely critical to turning the content of this book into something useful for your library or organization. The first is that even though the journalist’s comments could be written off as glib and sarcastic, and it is quite possible some librarians would find those comments offensive, they do carry a kernel of truth. There has been much angst, without much in the way of solutions.

So, if your ultimate motivation in reading this book is to uncover the “truth,” to find an alternative business model, then you are putting things in the wrong order, and setting yourself up to fail.

Digging up more and more data will not provide answers. It does not matter how granular, or how detailed your data is – if you are measuring something that does not work, something that is fading, something that is becoming irrelevant – then the act of measuring more of it will not help you to find relevance. It can only tell you what you already know; your business model is broken. I cannot emphasize this enough, as many librarians are driven by an almost primal need to collect more and more data. Indeed, many librarians are data hoarders – they have a problem, and they need to remove the clutter, not add to it. And like all hoarders, they are in denial, and stress only makes things worse. Building a great wall of performance measures will not protect your organization from the hordes of technological change.

The journalist’s comment also raises another point that is very pertinent to this book. If something is “wishy-washy” then throwing more measures at it will not firm things up. If you cannot describe in concrete words the value your service and/or products are providing to clients, then there is no hope of doing so with numbers. If, for example, you wish to measure the success of a hypothetical program, say the “Collaborative and Information Technology Enriched Learning Spaces” (CITELS) program, and it turns out when all the marketing collateral is pushed aside that CITELS is simply a purple room with WIFI access and a few tables and chairs, then numbers will not help you. Sure, you could run a room bookings count, a headcount of room usage, a count of unique student usage, a sum of bandwidth usage, a breakdown of the type of internet usage, a time series of the decibels in the room, a breakdown of use by student demographic, a nonparticipant observation study of the students behavior in using CITELS… and the list could go on.

The point is that no amount of measurements will tell you anything more relevant than the room is being used – if you cannot or have not identified the value proposition of the program. The purpose of offering a service or product is to provide something of value to the client. If you are unable to clearly articulate what that value actually is, then you cannot hope to measure the value provided.

Of course, client satisfaction has long been used by libraries, what about measuring client satisfaction with CITELS? But satisfaction with what? CITELS is just a name, it is not a value proposition any more than the word “Library” defines a value proposition. If you asked the clients whether they were satisfied with CITELS using a likert scale, and 95% responded they were “Very Satisfied,” then so what? It might make good marketing fodder for an uninterested or uncritical audience; however the numbers actually mean nothing. The client might be satisfied that they found a quiet place to sleep, another might think it’s a great place to play computer games, another might have enjoyed catching up with friends and talking about the weekend. None of those uses are likely to correspond to the intended value proposition. Once viewed this way, it is possible to conceive that every client was “Very Satisfied” for reasons that had nothing to do with academic learning. If you don’t know the intended specific value of the thing you are offering, then there is no way of knowing whether you succeeded in achieving the changes you hoped for by offering that value, and no amount of numbers will bridge that gap. I cannot underline the word “specific” enough.

The value proposition for CITELS could be many things. It might be to provide a safe space where students can work collaboratively on assignments. It might be to provide technology to enable students to work via a communication tool like skype to design and create things. These are two very different ways of using the rooms, and therefore the rooms would need to be configured quite differently to provide services to enable these uses. Similarly, the measurements you decide to adopt would need to be tailored to these differences in value propositions. Students cannot be said to be working collaboratively if they are working individually, any more than students can be said to be creating things if no objects are produced while students are in the room. It is possible to split hairs, and say what if the student started drafting something, etc. But that is completely irrelevant. Naturally you need to find the right measures, but these measures can only ever be right if they relate to the value proposition.

If you ultimately succeed in identifying appropriate measures, without really knowing why you are doing something, then you have been lucky, not clever! Once the intended benefit to the client is clearly articulated, then it should be possible to start to collect some accurate and meaningful data, not the other way around.

In summary, more data will not make “wishy-washy” value propositions come into focus, and more data on existing operations will not help you to identify new strategies to reverse the declining viability of existing business models. This book cannot help you with those specific problems. However, if you know why you are doing something, and you do not expect more numbers will magically reveal strategic opportunities, then this book might just be helpful.

What is the value proposition of this book then?

There is already a wealth of literature on what libraries should measure. I do not believe there is much value to be gained from me wading further into this field. Besides, it would only enable and encourage the data hoarders! This book is not about what to measure; it is about how to use data efficiently and effectively.

Of course, there are many books on how to measure data efficiently and effectively, these are called excel textbooks. However, as far as I am aware there is nothing targeted specifically at librarians. And on this note, librarians do need something specifically written for them.

Over the last decade I have observed what I would call a schizophrenic reaction in the library profession toward data. On one hand librarians love to collect data, but on the other hand many librarians are scared of the very things they collect. It is like an arachnophobic spider collector.

This fear of numbers is manifested in many different ways. I have witnessed librarians using a pen on a computer screen to manually count off the rows in a spreadsheet. I have seen librarians add up two cells using a calculator, then type that value manually into the cell below. I have seen librarians overwrite formulas with values, to force two sheets to reconcile. These are intelligent people doing dumb things, because they are scared of excel – and they are frequently scared of excel because they are scared of numbers. This fear cannot be overcome with excel textbooks, as they are designed for an audience that is numerically confident and literate. Also, being quite detailed focused; I have frequently found librarians tend to be literal, which means many can struggle to apply external concepts to the library profession. This of course is a generalization, and a generalization that does not discuss many of the wonderful attributes of a typical librarian. So, if you are feeling a bit offended, please don’t. The profession is full of wonderful people, and I would much rather a librarian any day over an engineer! You have picked up this book for a reason, and by logical deduction it means you need help with data. So let’s accept you have some issues to work through with data, and get on with it!