The Wise Use of Statistics in a Library-Oriented Environment

Abstract

As with most businesses, libraries use statistics to justify expenses, to monitor the library’s expansion and to predict prospective developments. This article describes SQL and shell techniques for data retrieval as well as further processing of the data using the open source statistical environment R. The article emphasizes some of the pitfalls and reasoning errors librarians could easily slip into. Having an academic background on statistics, the author is appointed to projects and tasks which need mathematical and statistical methods to be successfully accomplished.