Notes on the current status of work on the Archive
March 31, 2025
My thinking about the (maybe) duplicate tables...is that they may be revised tables. There are so many that, practically, I cannot trust my inspection to tell if the tables extracted from other publications and made available separately are revised or not. I think I have to include them and let the potential future users of the data make the decisions about the data. I press on with the NCES minutia.
March 29, 2025
I am going to work on the page for the publications of the School Library Media Centers. I believe I had the major pages but there are quite a number of smaller publications available. They mostly look like one or two-page tables from a larger publication. I am not sure of the value of including them here but I will continue until I have a better idea of what all these little files are.
March 27, 2025
I have finished a draft of the Benchmarking Tables. I will give it a few days so I can read it fresh and tidy up.
I would like to take a step back to the State Ranking Tables because these Benchmarking Tables do several things the State Ranking Tables did better. I first became aware of their importance while I was attending an FSCS meeting of the State Data Coordinators at the NCLIS office. I don't remember the details but NCES had said it would not continue publishing these tables. My hazy recollection is it was in an effort to exert some pressure on the state librarians but I am not sure nor what the objective was. I can say the panic was palpable so I perked up. Eventually, I said: “I can do them.” It was a true E.F. Hutton moment as all heads turned to me. Relief! Is it possible a librarian can do this? That was Friday and on Monday I had the complete set and found an error in the NCES calculations. It was a minor rounding error as a result of an incorrect option in the SAS PROC RANK procedure.
Whatever the consternation was ended, and life went on. NCES went on and continued publishing this series. But I became very interested in these tables and I have extensive notes accumulated over the years. I am not going to refer to them now but continue with my recollections because I have other things to do. These tables started in the early 1990s. If you mosey to the public library reports there are a number of the reports which include these tables but it is not always clear because they moved around in different publications and formats. Here is a nicer than average example for FY2010. That is pretty much what they look like. State ranks by per capitas. From the beginning of the series through FY2013, I could take the State Summary/State Characteristics data and generate the State Ranking Tables from code. They used SAS and I used SAS. To what end? I think the state librarians used these state data for what librarians often use library data: for comparisons of their states' libraries with those of other states. I suspect to use in budget discussions. So, these comparisons were important.
I knew I could do more. With the PUSUM dataset, I could trace ranks through time and trace changes in the fortunes of the state summary and state characteristics. It was amazing. Life has a way of intervening and I was in many interesting and busy places after that. But I checked these data from time to time and, of course, maintained PUSUM and PLDF3 through the years adding the new data as they were published. In FY2014, the emulation no longer worked. NCES had done something different and changed the method in some way I could not figure out. The documentation was simply wrong. I had a response to my inquiry but I could not make sense of it. Time slipped away. No subsequent inquiry was answered. A mystery. Given that the state Summary/State Characteristics data are no longer published, I am wondering. Then these Benchmarking tables...I wonder some more. Can I use those variables that overlap in some way? Maybe some but the Benchmarking Tables—I believe in most cases—do not use per capitas. That would be disappointing because library distributions are skewed characteristically and per capita measures are the common way to take this fact of library distributions into account.
March 25, 2025
I have checked IMLS's pages again. So far, nothing new as of the 23rd. I am now going to load the Benchmarking Tables here. These are a derivative set of data, I believe. The documentation is not unambiguously clear but I believe it is a subset of the data from the PLS AE files for the years 2018-2022. That is 27 tables for each of the 5 years. The tables are currently here on the IMLS site. I am not sure where I will put them in the Archive. I think I need to organize these files a bit differently. It will take a bit of time.
March 17, 2025
I have been in correspondence with the Data Rescue Project, “is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations” which is serving “as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk.” If you have such data and they are at risk, get in touch with them.
I believe the structure of the Archive is different from what they are expecting, given that I have collected these data over many years and changes in formats and agencies rather than one big dataset all in one place. We will see how I can get these data to another place, if practical. I expect they are busy. In any case, I did a preliminary count of the number of files in this Archive. So, it is rough, and I am still working on the US Government files. There are 502 US government publications related to library data that I have found so far. There are a total of 721 total of all library data publications in the Archive.
March 17, 2025
I believe at this point, I largely have all library data publications by US Government entities. I took a look yesterday evening once more and I found a place on the IMLS Website that I had not seen before and found some publications I thought I had not seen. So far, I have found them all. One was a state library file that was in the public library files. There is tidying up that needs to be done.
March 6, 2025
I spent the next few weeks working on the Archive in its new home, tidying up and making changes. And then the report came out that President Trump was issuing an order to dismantle the Department of Education. My notion that working on the Archive would be a bit of a leisure task was not to be because the National Center of Education statistics has been a source of library data. Also, President Trump made a similar plan to dismantle IMLS public. IMLS is the source of our national public library data series. As I have said, I believe that I had everything that any agency had published since about 1987. I find I have missed some stragglers so I will have to fix that.
February 19, 2025
In addition to the LRS, I must note that Kim Miller (NCLIS,) Barbara Holton, and Elaine Kroe, helped enormously. See: the:Introduction to the NCES/IMLS Data for more backtround. There are many digital files here of NCES publications. As they saw what I was doing, they started sending me copies of NCES library publications that had been digitized. That was gracious and appreciated help. Given the current situation, their help now comes to the fore. If you examine those NCES publications, you will often see their names listed. Also, The National Commission on Libraries and Information Science helped in ways too numerous to list and thanks to Madeleine McCain, Kim Miller, and Bob Willard. It was a pleasure to know and work with them.
February 19, 2025
This was moving day. For a number of years, the Library Research Service, an office of the Colorado State Library has graciously hosted this Archive as I worked on it. The Archive would not exist without their hosting it while I built it. Life goes on, things change, and they asked me to move it and waited patiently–or so it appeared to me. I thank the many people at the LRS who helped.
The last few years I have been busy and have not kept things up and, too, I lost access to data software that made life much easier so things go slower now. I will be updating these files and adding data from more libraries, provinces, countries.