Libraries Do Make a Difference: Common Principles in Showing the Impact of Different Types of Libraries

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a method for a common presentation of the
statistics of different types of libraries in an easy-to-understand and illustrative way to be
used as a tool for obtaining information as a basis for showing the impact and value of
libraries. We compared the statistics of public and scientific libraries and defined the
common data sets for them. These data sets that represent the essential key figures of the
libraries give a uniform picture of different types of libraries (scientific or public). We
combined the statistical data with data obtained from customer surveys from both library
sectors and we built a web site for presenting this data. Our experience is that it will be
necessary to improve data collection further opening the interfaces between the two
different statistic databases (public and scientific libraries) so that the library managers,
other decision makers and stakeholders can define even more versatile searches to
combine the information.