Statistics, Damn Statistics, and Liars

Statistics. The future is held in the statistics. That is a mantra that librarians should start to chant to themselves. We need to embrace statistics as if it were going out of style.  If you go to a ton of effort to design a site or a Facebook page, then keeping strong statistics is an absolute requirement. I would make the similar analogy of putting $1000 in your bank account and never looking to see where you are spending your money. Too many times are we unable to define specifically what the public is doing because we rely on subjective statistics. We rely on what we see from our desks. Too many times I will always hear that I always see a patron do this or that. This is the wrong approach. One person out of ten actually does this making it the exception, not the rule. If you think by being a librarian, you know how people search, then you are wrong. Searching behavior can be as unique as a one-legged man in an ass kicking competition. Research is the key to understanding what happened before, what is happening now, and what may happen in the future. Statistics are the lifeblood of this research. I do not need to know what you think patrons are doing. Tell me with assurance what you know for a fact because of the statistics. We are in a new frontier as far as assumptions to be made for services like reference. No longer can we simply look at the circulation figures and say we are doing badly because those figures are down. This worked ten years ago, maybe five years ago, but today we are in a whole new world where we need to reconsider almost everything we do. Services like Google Analytics can help you in this endeavor. People may still be using library services to get their information. They just may not be getting them from the traditional sources. We need accurate, documented statistics from ebooks to databases to the website to social networking. This is a new frontier because it may call for a cross analysis where we look at all these statistics and try to find something in common. To say that something like reference is dead based on circulation statistics is like a blind person saying, "Damn, that sun is bright today." Without research and more to the point, statistics, we can never understand our current situation.  Speaking of social networking, this brings up a whole new ballgame. Libraries do need to be involved with social networking, but they cannot follow traditional statistical methods. They simply do not apply. We are in a whole new world with social networking metrics. This is something we must embrace and try to understand as much as possible. I think the key here is to remember that social networking becomes more about qualitative research, not quantitative. For example, we cannot take a Facebook page and judge it based on the number of likes we have received.  You need to go deeper underneath the surface to understand what our users are actually doing with us.  Social networking is dependent upon interaction. How many times have you liked a page to simply ignore its existence completely? We have so many technological services to offer that we must understand completely how they are being used in order to maximize them. We must try to move away from the former looking glass because the world has changed. Leave tradition for the Fiddler on the Roof, while we look at these new kinds of  statistics.