Numbers

I was reminded today about the importance of people. We often have to justify our libraries in terms of numbers.  It seems like we are always crunching numbers to show how we are doing.  But if those numbers are not tied to people, then they are meaningless.  It is easy for us to get distracted from the qualitative nature of what we do.  The student working on a paper is not that worried about our statistics.  He wants answers and a good encounter.  There is that saying, "Keep the main thing the main thing."  Our main thing is service.  We still need our statistics, but they must come in second to our patrons.