Gaaah! I just spent the whole day compiling several months’ worth of statistics for August-December of last year. That’s a lot of numbers for a person who doesn’t like ‘em. I’m not sure if it’s worse to have piles of numbers or piles of books and papers. I know, I know, I shouldn’t have let them pile up to begin with. But there’s been so much to do since last fall, I felt compiling statistics was the least of my worries.

I will admit that a marathon session of statistical compilation gave me some good ideas on how to revise our departmental statistics. One thing’s for sure– we keep track of way too many things! For example, we could stop counting corrections and transfers of attached records. We can stop manually counting cataloging and added copies statistics. I can get those numbers from creating lists and compiling reports in Millennium and Excel. But I still want to keep track of hours spent on work activities, so supervisors can have an idea of where their employees spend their time.

I feel confident I’ll get a handle on these squirrelly numbers soon enough and wrestle them under control. I can’t wait to tell staff what they can stop counting.

While I was immersed in numbers today, trucks of vendor shelf-ready books appeared outside my office. I could feel them staring me down, especially the one with holds. Sigh… there are never enough hours in the day to do it all…