Here are a few factoids that illustrate how the impact of a cultural institution like the BBC might be measured.

The Guardian reported earlier this month that “The BBC’s digital media services, now grouped together in the future media and technology division, had a budget of £182m during the last financial year, up from £153.7m for 2006-2007.” These figures come from the BBC’s 2007-08 annual report.

This month the Beeb published Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ research “into the economic impact of the BBC’s publicly funded services on the UK broadcasting and creative sector.” The PWC report found that the BBC creates value of “approximately £6.5bn per annum or more than £5bn in the creative sector alone,” is a major provider of training and investment stability for the UK’s creative industries and drives competition and regional development in the creative sector. If the BBC were replaced by a commercial broadcaster, the report says, Britain would lose around £4.4bn of economic impact. (source: BBC Internet blog 22 July 2008)
In 2007 the main BBC web site saw 33 million unique weekly global users including 12 million British adult users per week. More than 16 million BBC podcasts were downloaded in the month of March 2008. (source: BBC Internet blog, 11 July 2008)

The BBC Trust says the Beeb should be a “trusted guide” for Internet users. In a series of blog posts, former BBC.co.uk staffer Martin Belam analyses the Trust’s recommendations about search; on links to external web sites; and on embedded content.

Now the Beeb has appointed Roly Keating as its first Director of Archive Content “with responsibility for maximising public access to the BBC’s invaluable archive of television, radio and multimedia content.” (tip o’ the hat to the BBC Internet blog for this link and quote, and for the quote below)

The BBC TV Archive web site provides more information about digitising and making available this uniquely deep, rich collection of stuff.

In an introductory video Adam Lee remarks:

“We’ve got about 4 million physical items for TV and radio. That’s equivalent to 600,000 hours of TV content and about 350,000 hours of radio. So we’re getting very close now to a million hours of material. We also now have a New Media archive, which is keeping a record of the content that goes out on the BBC’s websites. We also have large sheet-music collections, we have commercial music collections. We have press cuttings going back 40 years as well. So it’s a very large-scale operation.”

How might a university demonstrate its public value? Accepting the maxim that “you value what you count,” what sorts of things should we be keeping count of — the number of books in our libraries, the dollar value of our cultural collections, how many people visit our exhibitions? And what else?

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?