Ah, statistics. We love ‘em and we hate ‘em.

This is a picture of a book cart on the floor at the Darien Library. It is a wonderful illustration of how even the most innovative libraries are bound to our most treasured statistic: materials circulation. I took this picture last week in Darien when I was attending “In the Foothills: A Not-Quite-Summit on the Future of Libraries”.

John Berry (Editor-at-large, Library Journal, New York, NY) and Kathryn Greenhill (Emerging Technologies Specialist, Murdoch University Library, Perth Western Australia) joined John Blyberg (Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience, Darien Library) and a room full of clever librarians came together to talk about… you guessed it, the future of libraries. We discussed everything from Benjamin Franklin to Second Life that day, and we began to tackle the issue of how librarians can measure some of the non-traditional (not materials related) work we do. Conversation was very good, but I don’t think any of us walked out of the room with a concrete plan.

Moving on to Nashville…

Tomorrow, at PLA Spring Symposium, I’ll attend “Silk Purses and Sow’s Ears? Assessing the Quality of Public Library Statistics and Making the Most of Them” and look for more inspiration. That said, after doing a little snooping I found Meg Canada’s presentation “Developing Your Social Media Strategy”.  She’ll be offering it at a different workshop (at the exact same time) called “Today’s Library: From the Inside Out”.  How frustrating that her presentation is not part of a workshop about metrics! I was immediately reminded of something that seems to be turning into my mantra lately: creating web content for your library and promoting web content for your library are NOT SEPARATE ACTIVITIES! In addition, usage data coming from google analytics or whatever tool you use is just as important as your materials circulation, and creating solid web content for your community is just as important as buying the right books for them.

Enough rant, I’m looking forward to a good workshop tomorrow.

Follow and use hashtag #plaspring09 on twitter, I’m hoping some people do some tweeting… We’ll see…