Lies, damm lies, and indexes

摘要

Who would have guessed that someone daring to rate America's public libraries using their own statistics would provoke such a ruckus? In the aftermath of American Libraries' publication of Thomas Hennen's AMerican Public Library rating (HAPLR) Index, (AL, Sep. 1999, p. 64-68), the library community burned up the telephone and e-mail lines across the country. Among the pertinent questions librarians asked each other was: Who says this method is the one way to rate every public library in the land?