RIPS Law Librarian Blog – “I think we can all agree statistics are important. I collect them every day. In fact, I enjoy collecting them! It gives me a certain satisfaction to enter a research question into my tracker and log it in the knowledge bank. I like knowing how many patrons came in this week and how attendance has increased at my training sessions. But when was the last time you sat down and analyzed those statistics? If you’re like me you may just be mindlessly collecting them to “look at in the future” and that future isn’t coming any time soon. Every day I collect two separate sets of statistics. One is for the 9th circuit – they actually do take the time to analyze those statistics and present them to our stakeholders to continually show our value. The other stats are just for me and are specific to my branch. I collect a lot of the same data but it’s easier to pull out and analyze my branches data if I do it this way. Today I realized I’ve been using Google forms to collect statistics for the past year and I haven’t done anything with that data. I’ve been collecting with no clear goal in mind. So, I sat down and asked myself what are my statistics even supposed to be measuring? What do I want to know about my patron’s library behavior?…”