Is Government preparing to
ditch Cipfa?
THE Libraries Taskforce has criticised the accuracy, timeliness, usability, relevance and cost of the sector’s primary data source: the Chartered Institute of Public Finance Accountants (Cipfa) Public Libraries statistics. Although it said the criticisms in its report should “not be read
as impugning the work of Cipfa” the taskforce’s recommended remedy is that “all library services contribute in the future to a consistent and comprehensive open dataset, along the lines of the work currently being led by the Taskforce Team”. The report, produced by a Cambridge MPhil student placement, questioned Cipfa’s:
l Accuracy: “It is possible that library services are less likely to turn in figures that are poor… as more library services drop out, the fewer services these average per cent differences are drawn from, the more likely each average is to be swayed by outliers.”
l Timeliness: “Not only are the Cipfa statistics too broad, but they are also too late. Six months after the fact is much too slow for a modern library service.”
l Usability: “The data is not structured appropriately for ana- lytics” it said, “the excel spreadsheet, as published, is practically unusable for analytic purposes”.
l Relevance: “Cipfa misses important variables that either reflect the changing nature of library use today or enable library services to pinpoint trouble spots or learn from each other. For instance, this report evidenced the lack of variables surrounding management and staff quality.”
l Costs and ethics: “The nature of Cipfa’s statistics sheets goes against the very ethos of the library sector: proprietary data, expen- sive and inaccessible, is the exact opposite of the free and open information libraries are proud to provide.”
The Taskforce acknowledges that the Cipfa data is the “primary source of information regarding long-term trends for libraries across the United Kingdom,” but some fear that open criticism of it could undermine local authority participation – library services taking part decreased from 89 per cent last year to 86 per cent this year. Sources have also questioned whether there is a viable alternative to the Cipfa data yet and say improvements will be difficult until local authorities are compelled to take part by law. The report hints at more automated data collection but it is believed
other departments have attempted similar projects which failed due to the diversity of data systems used by local authorities Sheila Bennett, Head of Libraries Strategy and Delivery; and In- terim Head of Libraries Taskforce Team, said: “This report set out to investigate long-term trends in English library services as indicated by the Cipfa statistics; and as part of the methodology the student who wrote it looked at the limitations of the data. Her report analyses what we can learn from Cipfa data and discusses what we cannot. The 2016 Libraries Ambition Document included the specific priori- ty of “Helping libraries use better evidence to support decision-mak- ing” and that we want to gather, analyse and share data across the public library network and train the library workforce to make best use of it, to help make strategic decisions, demonstrate the impact of libraries, meet user needs better, and improve day-to-day operation. We are already working on this with library services and Libraries Connected, with the aim of moving towards an open data model.” A Cipfa spokesperson said: “We welcome this helpful report and
look forward to working with DCMS to improve our public libraries data. It will be particularly useful to explore how best we can encour- age all library authorities to respond to our survey.”
September 2018 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 13
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