Libraries spend a lot of time gathering data to report back to parent institutions and membership organizations. Where does all that data end up and how do you get your hands on it? If you’re a member of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), you can buy it back from them for $238. If you’re a member of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) it’s free if the library director shares the username/password with you; if not, it’ll cost you $500 for the data in print format. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) provides it freely, in an easily downloadable format. Yes, the ARL provides the data for free, which means that when I want to use library data to test a hypothesis or look at a trend over time I’m going to head to the ARL. That’s really a shame because the results can’t be generalized to all libraries because not all libraries are ARL libraries.
If the push for libraries in this economy is to prove our value, how can we do that when the majority of our membership organizations hides the data from us? I understand that library organizations use membership dues to collect the data and as a result feel some ownership of it. If you’re a member of the ACRL or AAHSL, you may want to discuss with the leaders whether collecting and storing the data is enough, or if providing open access to that data would actually serve the organization better in the long run. How can we determine value if researchers can’t access the data needed to prove that value?
Imagine if there were a national database where libraries could report statistics, and then that data set was linked to the broader research community. That would mean that any researcher, anywhere in the world, could show us where we excel and what we need to work on, essentially advocating on our behalf. That’s a big dream and would require coordination at the national level. How about something simple to start with? If a single membership organization like AAHSL, for example, chose to make its data freely available, this NN/LM project would be mostly completed without any additional work from its members.
