OK, let's step back away from my temporary leap into fantasy and get back to REALITY. Let's talk about STATISTICS.
I've been reading Lorcan Dempsey's recent blog article on the uses of "Super Crunching" to enable a better understanding of users. He notes that libraries have been rather uninterested over all in this type of large scale usage and user analysis and suggests in several articles the potential value of understanding aggregated use and usage statistics.
I was fascinated enough that I went out and bought Ian Ayres' book Super-Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. It makes for a fascinating read and I am also left with the question of why we don't use a more data-oriented approach to understand exactly what is happening in our field. Rather, we prefer to go with our own conventional wisdom about what users want and what they do (or should) value. This is probably a mistake. At the very least, we have no way truly to justify our decisions in any testable manner.
I also had a number of thoughts about potential research projects looking into sustainability of digital archives and repositories that could be conducted if data about repository characteristics, longevity, death, collections, and usage were available. I did a search and was able to find some library-related statistics sites, such as the site put out by Library Research Services, that maintained by the Library Resource Center, and Robert Molyneux's US Library Data Sources and Analyses, but not a single digital archiving or digital repository-oriented data set. Are there truly no such animals?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment