Numbers Signify??

Harper's Index is a popular editorial feature which has now run 25 years. It gives statistical snapshots of various topics. The topics are selected to comment on each other.

Most public agencies produce statistics about their operation. The statistics are to serve the dual function of explaining the agencies' operation, and accounting for the public resources used during the course of operation.

The library's monthly statistics for many years have reported the number of active card holders, circulation totals, and other easily counted "things". More recently, the statistics have included public access computer use figures. Hopefully the statistics are informative and meaningful enough to warrant the time and effort expended to gather and publish them.


With increased use of electronic sources of various sorts, new ways of providing and accessing information and other "things" come into play, and call for new statistics to demonstrate how they are used.

Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a widely heralded exposition of how to make exciting and informative presentations of statistical information. This is a graph of activity on the library's FLICKR account:

An alternative to statistics is storytelling. "The library changed my life by ..." type stories can impart some sense of what libraries are and do.