The political discourse in the U.S. is affecting my psychological health. I’m not kidding! This became clear a few of weeks back after my colleague Keith Curry Lance brought a library statistics report to my attention. This was the 2016 Annual Report issued by Project Outcome, the Public Library Association’s (PLA) national standardized outcome measurement initiative funded by… Read More Fake Data
Even with the promises of big data, open data, and data hacking it is important to remember that having more data does not necessarily mean being more informed. The real value of data, whatever its quantity or scope, comes from the question(s) the data can help answer. There are various reasons any given set of… Read More Quadruple Your Statistical Knowledge in One Easy Lesson
It never hurts to revisit the basics of a method that we’ve chosen to apply to a task we want to accomplish or a problem needing solved. So, the recent announcement of the Library Edge benchmarks is a good occasion to discuss that particular performance assessment method. In the third edition of his book, Municipal… Read More Paved with Good Intentions
I recently ran across a series of studies suggesting that prayer tends to lessen anger and aggression. Researchers concluded that prayer helps people adopt a more positive view of adverse or irritating circumstances. There also happens to be a sideline to their findings that illustrates something you don’t hear much about from proponents of outcome… Read More Beware of Vengeful Prayer
The field of program evaluation has grappled with the political context of institutional performance measurement for decades. For libraries and universities, though, the politics of accountability is newer terrain. In some instances these organizations have unwittingly enrolled in a crash course on the subject, learning in real-time how volatile the process can be. A prime… Read More Fickle Users of Figures
Lib(rary) Performance 