Sixth Winter Institute on Statistical Literacy for Librarians February 2012

The University of Alberta Libraries will be hosting its sixth Winter Institute on Statistical Literacy for Librarians (WISLL) in February 22-24, 2012 in Edmonton:

"Librarians are facing more statistical information than ever before because of the electronic dissemination of statistics over the Internet. Concomitant with this are greater demands for statistics from user communities. Greater availability to statistics online, however, has not made this information necessarily easier to find or to retrieve. This Institute provides training in the strategies and tools for finding statistics and providing them in formats directly useful to users. This Institute is valuable and relevant to professionals working in academic, public and special libraries"

Topics to be covered include:

• A framework for thinking about statistics
• How statistics are derived from data
• The importance of definitions, standards and classifications to understanding statistics
• Using metadata to find statistics
• Knowing how to interpret statistical metadata
• Evaluating statistical sources
• Choosing official and non-official statistical sources
• Tools and strategies for locating statistics
• How to cite online statistics
• Finding and using statistics based on geography
• Addressing the challenge of finding statistics for small geographic areas

Registration opens on November 14, 2011. The conference is restricted to 30 participants on a first-come, first-serve basis.