2015 NELLCO Symposium on Use of Statistics in Law Libraries

NELLCO, an international consortium of law libraries, will be holding a symposium in Boston, Massachusetts on March 19-20, 2015 on Quantifying Your Value: Using Data to Promote Your Worth in Your Organization and Beyond.

The two-day event will explore how law libraries collect and use data around reference, interlibrary loan, acquisitions and collection development.

The plenary speaker will be Sarah Ryan, Empirical Research Librarian at Yale. Her topic will be "Enhancing the Institutional Information Cycle: Better Library Administration through Better Study Design, Data Gathering, Analysis, and Presentation":

"Law libraries are increasingly incorporating data and statistics into their acquisitions, budgeting, and strategic planning processes. Local library analytics and survey results from local, consortium, and national sources should tell a story about what a library is doing, where it is heading, and how it stacks up against other libraries. But is that what’s really happening? Oftentimes, national surveys fail to measure what matters, and local data gathering efforts yield only snapshot information. Most of us agree that there’s room for improvement. This session will provide a crash course in applied empirical research, and will demonstrate that donning a ‘researcher hat’ can help library administrators better determine what data to collect, how to use it, and how to collectively fill gaps in regional and national statistics via collaboration with NELLCO colleagues. Topics covered will include: research goal-setting, hypothesis development, research question writing, significance and impact statement development, survey research methods, research writing, and more."

The Supreme Court of Canada Library, Dalhousie University Law Library, University of British Columbia Library, the University of Ottawa Library, the University of Victoria Law Library and York University Osgoode Hall Law School Library are Canadian members of NELLCO.