The Difficulty of Indicating Transformation: The Challenge for Library Statistics and Surveys

Academic libraries have long refined the tools and skills in order to show their positive impact to research, to science and to the overall society. The aim is to provide essential information for library managers and decision makers. However, the qualitative and quantitative analyses showing libraries’ impact should also provide indications about change, i.e. the transformation of such social practices that challenge the essence of libraries.

This paper presents two sources of information for analysing libraries’ impact on the national level. The first is the Finnish Research Library Statistics Database and the second is the National Library End-User Survey of Finnish Libraries. The Database includes the annual statistics of all Finnish higher education institution libraries and also several special libraries. The End-User Survey is an online questionnaire aimed at the customers of all library sectors. These sources of information have been collected for several years and they can therefore reveal changes in time. They have been adjusted to the changing information needs and the transforming functions of libraries. Still, the society seems to transfer faster than these mechanisms can capture.

This paper discusses reasons why the transformation of social practices may be out of the reach of traditional information sources for analysing libraries’ impact. There are methodological issues to be considered. Furthermore, the paper examines the newly-published ISO 16439 standard on impact evaluation. The aim is to discuss how the standard comports with the recent practices of national-level data collection. The paper ends with discussion on complementary information sources which can be useful in tracing societal transformation.