Statistics

Or maybe they're just not that interesting?
Our 05/06 statistics are due to the Chancellor's Office tomorrow and one quick check I can do easily is to run through line by line and compare with last year. There are differences-- sometimes mistakes, sometimes normal change, sometimes because of an aberration easy to remember right now (influx of one time money for books, for example) although probably difficult to figure out a few years from now.
I always wonder what use we could or should make of them-- do they answer any questions for us? Should we be using them somehow to set targets for next year, to track the effect of something we're trying? More often than not they seem to be telling us something we're not quite listening to and also seem to be mildly interesting rather than a call to action. We track other rather random statistics in various parts of the Library, think we should be doing better at tracking and analyzing others like web hits-- but this basic set that must be collected don't seem to be used meaningfully. And yet someone decided they were important to collect.