You’re not alone!

In our conversations with peers and colleagues, the Information Futures Commission project team are often asked, “Where’s your evidence?”

It’s a natural question: we are, after all, working in an academic environment ;-) Because it’s good business practice, the Commission wants to make evidence-based recommendations about policy and strategic directions for the University’s scholarly information.

Big spreadsheets of benchmarking statistics, trend data or survey results are often hard to read and understand.

In an effort to stimulate conversations — and remind ourselves of nifty ideas — Mark, Linda, Sally and I have started collecting our favorite factoids and turning them into an online slideshow.

We will be updating the Fabulous Facts slideshow at least once a week during April and May. To see the current version, visit the Fabulous Facts page on the Information Futures Commission web site — share, comment, tag and enjoy!

The Library regularly collects statistics about its activities. For example, we know how many items are checked out every year from the Legal Resource Centre – click the image below to see a larger version of the graph.

Another example: we know that in the week ending 4 August 2006 library staff received 197 telephone enquiries, of which 55 per cent were about loans or other library-related topics.

See more circulation statistics (intranet web page — UniMelb access only).

Some statistics are difficult to collect. We know how many people come into our 19 library branches each year. It’s harder to estimate how many of those people are students or staff of this University, and how many are either from other institutions or have no connection with the University of Melbourne (except that they wanted to use our library :-)

Because we want to make well-informed decisions, the Information Futures Commission will be looking for more evidence of this type — the more the merrier! We’ll also be looking for data about staff and student use of IT for scholarly activities.

So… over to you. What specific questions should we be trying to answer with statistical evidence?