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September 16, 2008
Completely hopeless CIPFA stats for public libraries
This is the beginning of the annual complaint about CIPFA statistics about public libraries. It will go on until next February.
Here we go
- They are incomprehensibly badly presented-- how is a councillor supposed to read them?
- They don't even contain a comparison with previous years
- They take far too long to produce in the days of computers and websites, so by the time they emerge they are irrelevant.
- The spreadsheets are not free to the public and they should be
- The press release that comes with them is always a joke of misinformation.
Why doesn't someone else provide a decent reputable service instead of them ?
As they are the only basic source of fundamental information about expenditure and performance in this £1.3bn public service, it is no wonder the public libraries in the UK don't know what their problems are nor how to address them.
This item should have been number one on Roy Clare's list of matters to be addressed last year and so far he has done nothing. Zilch. Next year's figures will be the same dross as those of every year of the the last twenty.
In past years we had the benefit if the LISU analysis of actual perfrmance which told a story. The MLA scrapped those and now we have nothing.
Posted by Perkins at September 16, 2008 10:57 AM
Comments
I bet they will cost more to produce than last year!
Posted by: Martyn at September 16, 2008 6:07 PM