The Usage of National Library Statistics – What can be done better?

Abstract

National library statistics are helpful for comparing the own library with other libraries in your own or in other countries, to give an overview about the libraries of the country and to show their development. But in comparing 22 public and academic libraries of five countries difficulties arose in finding key performance indicators in national library statistics to use. Out of this, the idea to conduct a workshop with librarians from different countries was born. In the workshop, we asked the participants for their ideas about what is good and what is missing in national library statistics; what kind of data is relevant for librarians; why not every library is participating in collecting statistics and what might be done about it. Results of this workshop will be presented and discussed in this paper.