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Statistics in Overdrive/Overdrive in Statistics
By howard | November 28, 2008
The election campaign season sent me back to the news-junkie-ism I thought I had gotten under control many years ago. In the exhaustion that followed the election returns, though, I, like so many others, have had to find strategies for returning to a ‘normal’ life. Chief among those has been a determination to avoid tuning the car radio to news broadcasts during my brief, but often traffic jam ridden commute.
Like all of my resolutions – about portion control, working out and the like – my success rate has not risen to what it ought to be – after all, my NPR addiction is almost 30 years old. So I have turned to the strategy that was such a help long ago when I abandoned cigarettes, substitution.
What is more appealing than the morning and the evening news? A well written, well read book, of course and many of those are available to check out digitally at the Ocean State Library (OSL)’s E-zone (browse there from your local library’s homepage or go directly to http://riezone.lib.overdrive.com). Thousands of titles are waiting there to be borrowed in audio format as though they were physical books sitting on the shelf at the local library, except that at E-zone, the local library is open 24/7 and the books require a little help from a little bit of technological gear. The directions for using the service, though, are remarkably simple. As the welcome screen at the E-zone site says,
“Browse, Check Out, and Download best selling digital titles 24/7 to your PC and PDA at home, in the office or from anywhere in the world. Now you can hear Audiobooks and Music, or view eBooks and Videos–Free. Digital media can be downloaded and listened to on your home PC and if the publisher allows burned to CD for your car stereo. All titles can be transferred to many supported portable devices–all without leaving the comfort of your home! Now your library never closes! Check one out today!”
I don’t recommend the eBooks or the videos for your commute, but now, in the middle of 7 hours and 19 minutes of listening to Simon Winchester regaling me with the story of the making of the OED (with all of his charm, wit and endearing propensity for digression live in my ears as he reads me his book, The meaning of everything) instead of being assailed with the ongoing tale of hell’s handbasket (thanks to Patricia J. Williams for that phrase) that travel-time news reports, I am in much more relaxed.
OSL’s E-zone is one of the great examples of things libraries in RI do better together. Buying and using the service as a multi-jurisdictional multi-institutional collaborative saves each municipality and its libraries time and money and each library user fuss and bother. At the same time, each library is able to offer a far greater selection of downloadable titles than it could were it to go it alone. The electronic equivalent of interlibrary loan and OSL’s one-card-for-all-the-public-libraries provides every Rhode Islander access to all the available titles.
Downloadables are great for library users (the e-books and videos included) and represent a significant advance in libraryland’s efforts to keep up with our mission of interfacing between our clientele and the world of information and cultural packaging (per Jesse Shera’s dictum that we find for “each reader his [/her] book and for each book its reader”). It is a trouble, though for those of us who bother ourselves with measuring library service and paving the road for researchers to analyze our world and find better ways for us to serve.
The ground zero of such botheration for Public Libraries is IMLS (the federal Institution for Museum and Library Services)’s Public Library Statistics Cooperative, (PLSC, the successor to the Federal State Cooperative System for Public library Data, FSCS, that had been managed until last year by the National Center for Educational Statistics and the National Commission on Library and Information Services), who are holding their annual symposium December 3-5, 2008 and will be deliberating on, among other things, how to account for use of downloadables from public libraries. Data Coordinators from each state and territory as well as staff from IMLS’ brand new research and statistics program will take part in the forum.
The debate is twofold; 1) how do you count downloadables in a particular library’s collections and 2) how do you count circulation? If a title is bought by a consortium (like OSL), it is available to all the libraries; analogous to a book with a copy on the shelf in every library and branch; does this count as one purchased item or, in the case of OSL, 71 items? When the item circulates, which library does it circulate from? The one that bought it; hence “owns” it, or the library at which the borrower is registered? Both matters are made more complicated by the nationwide variety in the way libraries deploy downloadable service. Methodologies range from a single purchase by a group of libraries through individual purchases by libraries all using a single contract, to individual libraries purchasing individual use contracts for use in a multi-library loaning collaborative or individual libraries circulating exclusively to their registered borrowers.
Even here in OSL, some titles are purchased jointly to be “always available” while others come out of an individual library’s budget and are available to only one user at a time. Trouble is that for the data to be useful to researchers, we will need to define our terms for data collection the same way throughout the country. Next week PLSC will try to decide what that way will be and next year or the year after, public libraries will report that way on their annual reports. Other topics of discussion will include the question of how old a YA is and how old children are.
I will be participating both as Rhode Island’s State Data Coordinator and as a delegate from COSLA the national association of Chief Officers of State Library Agencies. Let’s talk; what do you think about downloadable service and how you think we ought to count them.
Topics: Annual Reports, General | 1 Comment »
February 10th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Thanks for your suggestion about the digital Ocean State Library!