Tag Archives: Spreadsheets

I was one of a number of people in the room who sat up smartly when Ross MacIntyre opened his presentation at the 2012 UKSG conference by saying that spreadsheets are a waste of intellectual ability. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is crucial, and we need the appropriate information to inform and support our decisions, but this information is a means to an end and it is all too easy to get so involved in collecting and storing the information that we run out of time or energy to do anything with it. Librarians have moved beyond the point where just having the data is enough, we now see this a way to improving our library service. Time and effort needs to be focussed on interpretation and use, not downloading statistics and finding our own methods (usually in Excel) to produce comparable reports.