1 Gathering and analysing evidence

As a librarian, you will often need to review your practices and compile reports which evaluate your library’s performance. When writing reports or undertaking a review, it’s important to identify your audience and tailor the tone of your writing accordingly. For example, a report for governors or the senior leadership team (SLT) should be formal and detailed, whereas an update circulated amongst parents might be briefer and chattier. However, no matter who you are writing for, you should support your arguments with evidence wherever possible, ensuring that you are focused and analytical in your approach.

One of your most significant sources of data will be the reports from your Library Management System (LMS). In particular, you may be able to obtain information on the most borrowed books and most popular authors, as well as other borrowing statistics which are broken down by category, for example, by gender or genre. You could even view the borrowing data for students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) or students with English as a second language (EASL). In doing so, your LMS will be able to supply you with important data on reading and literacy, a topic which will undoubtedly be of common interest to all schools, whatever their teaching and learning objectives. Using this data might influence and inform anything from library funding and procurement to collection management and your school’s literacy development plan.

Whether it’s reading and literacy analytics from your LMS, feedback and suggestions from staff and students, the footfall counter on your security gates, or your social media and website analytics, evidence is most useful when viewed in context. For instance, if you are interested in breaking down borrowing statistics by gender, but one particular year group has a gender imbalance, interpreting the data in isolation may lead you to draw misleading conclusions. Similarly, you may find that there’s been a decrease in footfall and borrowing during one week of the year, however, further investigations might reveal that this can be explained by the fact that a year group has been on an exchange visit abroad. Applying context to the evidence you collect can help you to explain anomalies and more confidently identify trends.

It is important not to fall into the trap of reporting everything though. This can dilute your message and make those reading the report lose focus from the main points you are trying to put across. You should focus on your school’s goals and development plan and relate your evidence to these, as Sarah suggests in the next video.

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Transcript: Video 1

SARAH:

When you're writing a report, it's important not to fall into that trap of trying to report everything. You've got to make it far more focused. So we can look at the school's long-term goals and aims, and we can look at their mission statement, and we can look back and think which reports that we write are going to have the most impact, which ones need to be delivered to those stakeholders.

How we construct the reports really depends on what we're trying to achieve, but we want to aim really for a mixture of statistics and perhaps some anecdotal evidence as well. We are librarians and we know that we love a story. So if we can put in little stories about to exemplify what we're trying to put over to those stakeholders, they will enjoy that. And also when they write the school report, then having a little anecdote to put into that school report makes a big difference if you're a senior leader.

We need to think about the relevance of the data tables that we put in there. Why are they there? What are they doing? How are they going to add to that report? It might be data that we've taken from our library management system, we might be looking at the footfall in our library, or we might be looking maybe at some library social media accounts that we've got and seeing how those have been used not just by students, not just by staff, but maybe the wider community as well.

Another thing I used to find really useful and I have to say it boosted up my self-esteem, was to have a diary and every time somebody commented on something on the library, I would write down that comment in this book. So when I was having a bad day, I can look back over it and see the good things that had happened, but also it was so useful for that report.

We need to be aware that when we write reports, who is going to read them? And we might want to change the language, or the style of the report, or even the order of report, depending on if it's going to a senior leader, or a governor, or a parent. We need to be aware it could be used by different people and adapt accordingly.

End transcript: Video 1

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Video 1

In Video 1, Sarah suggests a combination of statistical and anecdotal evidence can help bring your report to life. Is this something you include in your reports at the moment? In the activity below, you will consider the reports your LMS can generate and how you use them in your reviews.

Now you have considered what information you should include in your reports and how you should report it, in the next section, you will develop these themes further and examine the different types of evidence that you can use to substantiate your arguments.