Sixth edition of ISO 2789:2022 International Library Statistics: major developments and contributions

Now in its sixth edition and with almost half a century of history, the International Standard ISO 2789 for International Library Statistics (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) is the most important standardization effort in the field of library evaluation. Created in 1974 under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), this international standard remains the primary reference for the collection of library statistics.

Its content and scope require regular updating to keep pace with changes in the way libraries operate, to maintain the necessary balance between traditional practices and technological innovation and to remain faithful to the uses and new realities observed in the field. A brief review of the evolution of the standard shows that while the second edition of 1991 developed the basic lines drawn in the first edition of 1974 around statistical data on library collections and services, the third and fourth editions of 2003 and 2006, respectively, addressed for the first time the complexity of measuring emerging electronic resources and services, and the fifth edition delved into new digital developments and included services for target populations with special needs (Oury and Poll, 2013; Poll, 2008, 2018, 2021; Renard, 2007; Sumsion, 2002).

On the other hand, ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) is the main axis within the corpus of ISO standards for library evaluation, and its content is being updated in line with the new editions of the standards for performance evaluation in libraries (International Organization for Standardization, 2023; International Organization for Standardization, 2019) and the standard for impact evaluation in libraries (International Organization for Standardization, 2014). All three standards share the same conceptual and terminological basis and will be updated to align their content. Within this corpus, ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) provides the basis for evaluation practice based on statistical measurement. It has also strongly influenced other standards on statistics related to other cultural organizations, such as museums (International Organization for Standardization, 2016) and archives (International Organization for Standardization, 2021b).

In its latest edition, 2022 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022), it continues to address the complexities of statistically quantifying the diverse and changing reality of libraries and provides a common basis for statistical data collection applicable to most libraries. At the same time, it offers the possibility of using library statistics with a higher degree of specificity and complexity for specific purposes.

As we will see below, the sixth edition is again focused on the reality of libraries, with the aim of faithfully reflecting new trends in collections and services and new uses by new users, as observed in libraries around the world and supported by literature and professional practice. Among other things, it addresses the complexities of measuring digital services and new research support services in libraries and explores the possibility of using data on the frequency and intensity of service use as a first approximation to understand the impact of libraries.

Against this background, the main objective of this document is to analyse the context in which the sixth edition of ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) has been developed, to address the main changes introduced in its content and to evaluate its major developments and contributions.

The decision to prepare a sixth edition of ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) was approved by ISO/TC 46/SC 8 Quality – Statistics and Performance Evaluation ^[1] at its plenary meeting in Ottawa, Canada, in May 2019.

As with previous editions, the work was carried out by the aforementioned Subcommittee 8 of ISO Technical Committee 46 through its Working Group 2 (WG 2) on International Library Statistics. The group is composed of professionals from different countries with experience in library evaluation projects and is chaired by Dr Roswitha Poll.

Following the publication of the fifth edition of the standard in 2013, and in accordance with ISO procedures for the maintenance and revision of draft standards, this group was tasked with monitoring the use of the standard to identify new needs for updating and to gather new contributions.

In 2018, the decision to undertake a systematic revision of the text five years after its publication was put to a vote among the participating countries. The results of the vote were as follows: 14 countries confirmed the existing version (Bulgaria, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Latvia, Norway, Portugal, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States of America), 5 countries supported the systematic revision (Estonia, Finland, France, Spain and Sweden) and 9 countries abstained (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, the Russian Federation, South Africa and Switzerland).

In addition, countries' responses to the questions on adoption and use of the standard showed that:

• (1)

  17 countries declared that the standard had been adopted or that there was an intention to adopt it as a national standard in the future: Austria, Bulgaria, China, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

• (2)

  Canada, Germany, Sweden and the United States of America reported that the standard was being applied or used without being nationally adopted, and only Estonia reported that ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) was referenced in its national regulations.

• (3)

  Bulgaria, Finland, France and Sweden reported that they were committed to participate actively in the development of a future systematic revision and to nominate an expert.

The main arguments that were put forward in favour of the revision were the following:

• (1)

  To adapt library statistics to rapid technological change;

• (2)

  To update the standard to reflect new library activities and to consider the possible inclusion of web archive statistics;

• (3)

  To consider including the full text of the COUNTER Code of Practice (COUNTER, 2023) as an annex to ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022);

• (4)

  To update the terminology and the metrics and

• (5)

  To take account of the continuing changes in library work and the development of social networking.

Following the vote, Subcommittee 8 approved the new draft standard at the aforementioned 2019 meeting in Ottawa and initiated the process of appointing a new coordinator for the standard. Subsequently, at the virtual plenary meeting in May 2021, Dr Roswitha Poll was re-elected as Chair of the Working Group for a further three years.

The preparatory work for the new normative text was carried out by COVID-19 in successive virtual meetings of the Working Group in the context of the global pandemic and concluded with the presentation of a first draft in its initial phase or “Committee Draft (CD)” on (date).

The processing of the draft up to its approval and publication as an International Standard took place with two main milestones ^[2]: in 2021, the text was approved in its “Draft International Standard (DIS)” phase and in March 2022, it entered its final pre-publication phase or “Final Draft International Standard (FDIS)” phase. The revision of the standard text culminated in the publication of the sixth edition of ISO 2789 in 2022 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022).

The following section discusses the main changes and new features of this sixth edition.

In its sixth edition, ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) has two main objectives: firstly, to correct the conceptual and methodological problems raised by the application of the fifth edition and, secondly, to incorporate the new developments in library services.

It also aims to align its content with that of other related standards that have been published or updated since 2013, most of them in the field of library evaluation and quality:

• (1)

  ISO/TR 14873 Information and documentation – Statistics and quality issues for web archiving (International Organization for Standardization, 2013);

• (2)

  ISO 16439 Information and documentation – Methods and procedures for evaluating the impact of libraries (International Organization for Standardization, 2014);

• (3)

  ISO 11620 Information and documentation – Library performance indicators (International Organization for Standardization, 2023);

• (4)

  ISO 11799 Information and documentation – Document storage requirements for archive and library materials (International Organization for Standardization, 2015);

• (5)

  ISO 5127 Information and documentation – Foundation and vocabulary (International Organization for Standardization, 2017) and

• (6)

  ISO 21248 Information and documentation – Quality assessment for national libraries (International Organization for Standardization, 2019).

As will be seen below, the new edition proposes mainly conceptual and methodological changes to the data collection, while its main purpose and scope remain the same: to provide guidance to libraries on the collection and presentation of statistical data and to allow statistical comparisons between libraries with similar features.

The general structure of the sixth edition of the standard maintains the sequence of the sections of the previous edition – the main innovation being the addition of a new informative annex (Annex C), which provides an overview of the complexity of measuring the use of digital resources and services.

The main body of the standard is divided into seven chapters, preceded by a brief prologue and an introduction, and followed by four informative annexes plus a bibliographic section.

The first three chapters conform the introductory part of the standard. They define the scope (unchanged from the fifth edition as indicated above), state its relationship with other normative documents (new Chapter 2, “Normative references”) and refer to the ISO and IEC as related sources.

Chapter 3 is the conceptual and terminological part of the standard and shares its terms and definitions with the other ISO standards on library assessment. The different terms are grouped into the following categories:

• (1)

  Library: types of libraries and administrative units;

• (2)

  Services and use: access, types of users, on-site services, digital services, services for target groups with special needs;

• (3)

  Collection: bibliographic materials on physical and digital media;

• (4)

  Access and facilities for different purposes;

• (5)

  Management (miscellanea): preservation, conservation and restoration, cooperation, retrospective cataloguing, library research and publishing by libraries;

• (6)

  Funding and expenditure and

• (7)

  Library staff.

Chapter 4 summarizes the library context in which the standard has been prepared, describing current library activities and current changes in user activities. It is this new context that has inspired many of the changes in this new edition of the standard: the consolidation of the digital world in collections and services and the permanent need for information literacy (for example, by incorporating the new concept of “educational services”), together with the growing demand for scientific works in open access; research support services in university libraries and the growing relevance of public libraries as a physical space with a cultural and social dimension.

Overall, a new model of library is recognized, where the digital offer is growing, while the physical space continues to attract users and stimulate new uses related to training, learning, leisure, obtaining specialized information, collaborative working (for example, the new “makerspace” service) and participation in social and cultural events. At the same time, the range of resources and services offered through the web and social media and networks controlled from the library’s own accounts is growing, and mobile technology applied to library services is being consolidated. The range of services offered includes bringing collections and services closer to users who are unable to come to the library premises for different reasons: illness, confinement, etc.

Chapters 5 and 6 contain methodological aspects of working with statistics: their usefulness for measuring inputs and outputs and for performance and impact assessments; practical issues of sampling, reporting and presentation of data and setting the statistical reporting period.

Chapter 7 is a methodological guide for the collection of statistical data in libraries. It sets out the criteria to be followed in identifying and quantifying data with library statistical significance. The chapter has retained the sequence of the previous edition, incorporating categories and sub-categories defined in Chapter 3.

Annex A complements Chapter 7 with more specific sub-categories. While chapter 7 retains the categories of data that are collected in most libraries, it refers to Annex A for those data that are only collected in certain types of libraries because of their specificity. In the sixth edition, sub-categories have been added relating to user typologies according to language and gender, including non-users and indirect users; user activities in their face-to-face and virtual visits; special services for researchers and web archiving. Due to significance, some data that appeared as annexed information in the fifth edition have now become part of the core chapters, e.g. sub-categories, of users by age group.

Annex B contains guidelines on data estimation in the compilation of national aggregate statistics. The text of the fifth edition has been retained with the addition of more details about calculations based on data from the previous year.

Finally, Annex C is a new informative section that provides an overview of the complexity of measuring digital usage, as explained below.

One of the most necessary changes in each new edition of 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) is the updating and adaptation of the terminology to reflect the changes that libraries have undergone and the new reality in which they are living. In this case, the changes introduced relate to two main areas: the digital context and the collections.

While in the 2013 edition the terms “electronic”, “digital” and “virtual” were used interchangeably to refer to collections, resources, services, events and library processes, in the sixth edition the terminology has been unified, selecting the terms most commonly used in practice and in the professional literature.

Thus, the term “digital” was selected to refer to collections and services. “Digital collection” replaces “electronic collection”, and “digital service” replaces “electronic service”. The terms “digital document” and “digital preservation” from the 2013 edition have been retained.

In addition, the term “electronic” is used in the standard to refer generically to document carriers (e.g. electronic book), and to refer to electronic document delivery. It also refers to electronic resources and equipment, electronic licences and electronic means of communication with users (e.g. e-mail).

Finally, the term “virtual” is reserved for online access, visits and events. Note that a nuance is introduced to differentiate virtual accesses from virtual visits, leaving the former for the fact of contacting and obtaining a response from a service and the latter for the activity already developed within the service. The term “session”, used in previous editions, has been dropped.

The term “special collection” was adopted from ISO 21248 (International Organization for Standardization, 2019) for materials defined by special format, subject, genre, date, geographic area, condition, rarity, source or value. In addition, new terms were added to refer to research data in institutional repositories managed by the library, as well as the digital object identifier (DOI). Also, new terms refer to the different models of acquisition and use of the digital collection, such as pay-per-view, the evidence-based acquisition (EBA) and patron-driven acquisition (PDA).

Moreover, the definitions of “preservation” and “conservation” have been updated in line with ISO 5127 (International Organization for Standardization, 2017). Preservation is no longer considered “intervention technique” but a “preservation measures and actions applied to prevent arrest or delay deterioration of a document or other material object”.

Both conservation and restoration extend their scope not only to documents but also to all types of material objects. The concept of “stable condition,” taken from ISO 21248 (International Organization for Standardization, 2019), is incorporated to refer to materials that may have some damage but can be used without immediate risk of further deterioration. The definition of digital preservation is maintained, and digital preservation repositories have been added to the standard.

In this section, we focus on the contents that have been incorporated or expanded in the sixth edition or that have been subject to in-depth revision.

The new ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) reflects the role of research support libraries in the management, publication, dissemination and evaluation of scientific works.

On the one hand, with the expansion of open access, libraries have taken on new responsibilities for managing and preserving research content (both research works and data sets) in institutional repositories.

On the other hand, libraries advise researchers on the use of specialized information sources and on the management and evaluation of their own scientific production, including issues such as bibliometric analysis and the maintenance of author profiles.

In this new context, the “subject librarian” with training and/or experience in a specific subject or academic discipline becomes a new relevant professional profile.

The new concept of “research support” is defined in the standard as a “library service that allows a researcher to spend more time, more efficiently in his/her role as a researcher, and contributes positively to the quality of the research”. This concept encompasses four main issues:

• (1)

  Managing information: information seeking and finding, citation management, alerting services, etc.

• (2)

  Publishing, especially open access publishing and copyright issues;

• (3)

  Bibliometrics and

• (4)

  Research data management.

The statistical quantification for research support services includes the following items:

• (1)

  Number interviews with subject librarians;

• (2)

  Number of copyright enquiries;

• (3)

  Staff time spent on research support and

• (4)

  Contents of institutional research data repositories.

The fifth edition of ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) introduced the concept of “target population with special needs” and established statistics on those library collections, services and events designed for population groups with special needs. The sixth edition has added new concepts that provide a better understanding of population diversity in libraries:

• (1)

  New term “minority language”, as a complement to “language of document”, for “language used by nationals of a state who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the state’s population”;

• (2)

  New sub-categories of library staff by age groups and by gender, complementing the traditional classification by professional categories and

• (3)

  New sub-categories of types of users by age groups, which appeared as supplementary information in the previous edition of the standard, have been incorporated into the main body of the standard.

Further sub-categories of staff by ethnic or cultural origin have been omitted from the standard because of the difficulty in some countries of recording them statistically. For the same reason, a breakdown of staff and users by level of education has not been included.

The new standard incorporates the concepts of equity, diversity and inclusion. The definitions were taken from ISO 304153:2021 Human resource management–Diversity and inclusion (International Organization for Standardization, 2021a). They have been selected following the recommendations of the ALA Task Force on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in its 2016 report (American Library Association, 2016), as well as the ODLOS Glossary of the ALA Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services (American Library Association, 2017). With this minimum conceptual framework, the standard is open to the inclusion of new statistics in future editions that will serve to make issues of equity, diversity and inclusion in libraries more visible.

The new standard aims to provide a better understanding of the library’s current and potential user population in order to more efficiently size and plan its service offer and future needs.

In this sixth edition, the term “user” is used to refer to the recipient of library services; the obsolete terms “patron” and “customer” have been removed, while the former terms “population to be served”, “external user”, “registered user”, “active user” and “active borrower” have been retained.

The concept “non-user” has been introduced to refer to people who do not use the library, although they are part of the population to be served. Quantifying non-use and exploring the reasons for it are of interest for planning library resources, evaluating the quality of library services and studying their impact on the community.

Estimating non-users is only possible through surveys by using samples of the library’s natural population. The new standard aims to achieve a better understanding of its actual and potential user population, with a view to more efficiently sizing and projecting its service offer and future needs.

In the same vein, the new concept of “indirect user” refers to those users who, without being registered, use library services through another registered user. The number of indirect users, who evade the quantification of registered users and can often hide behind the number of non-users, is of interest for resource planning and for measuring the impact of the library. Anyway, we will have to wait for future editions of the standard to see how meaningful and useful it is for library statistics.

The new standard focuses on the different ways in which people interact with libraries in order to assess the level of use of services and to adapt them to real needs. Thus, two types of access are distinguished: virtual access to online services and physical access, with a distinction made between physical and virtual visits.

In addition, the new standard collects information on the duration of physical visits through the use of check-in/check-out registers, detection devices and surveys at specific times. The importance of respecting data protection in the application of these procedures is emphasized.

On the other hand, the activities carried out by users during their visits, both face-to-face and virtual, are examined.

For face-to-face visits, the standard suggests using surveys, user interviews and direct and indirect observation methods and provides a list of activities to be asked about or observed.

For virtual visits, the standard suggests the use of online surveys at the end of the visit and log analysis. As with the face-to-face visits, a list of common activities for virtual visits is proposed to be analysed within the visits.

The standard has been enriched with new terms related to the use of digital services, such as “browser”, “caching”, “geolocation”, “like”, “log file”, “opt-in”, “opt-out”, “page tagging”, “page impression” and “streaming service”.

Usage data are collected from the website, from services configured for mobile devices and from library services on social networks. Moreover, the standard mentions the usefulness of Google Analytics as a tool for measuring usage.

In addition, the new standard recognizes the efforts of the COUNTER Code of Practice (COUNTER, 2023) to standardize usage statistics from digital resource providers. However, it was not considered appropriate to include it as an annex to ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) as they are normative documents with different purposes.

New alternative measurements for digital services have been included within the new Annex C:

• (1)

  Frequency of use: visits, page impressions, downloads and searches;

• (2)

  Point of use (date and hour): to detect times of high use and low use;

• (3)

  Visit duration: these data provide information about the impact of specific resources;

• (4)

  Access path: via the website of the library, links in social media, etc.

• (5)

  Devices used: personal computers, mobile devices, etc.

• (6)

  Modes of searching: basic search, advanced search, etc.

Finally, the standard also recommends the use of surveys or observation methods to collect data relating to users of digital services, e.g. the user profile, geographical origin, subject or area of interest and socio-demographic characteristics. The standard warns of the difficulty of such measurements, given that libraries are often dependent on data supplied by external providers and the constraints of data protection.

In the nearly 50 years and 6 editions since its inception, ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) has been regularly expanded and updated to reflect the ever-changing realities and challenges faced by libraries. Although during this time there has been a growing demand for more “meaningful measures” that show not only the quantity but also the quality and impact of library services (Poll, 2021, p. 294), the crucial role of statistics as the necessary foundation for these other types of measures has remained unchanged, and ISO 2789 (International Organization for Standardization, 2022) has become the fulcrum around which all other library evaluation standards have been and continue to be built.

In its sixth edition, one of the main drivers of change has been the impact of the digital environment on library operations, which has been particularly noticeable in the wake of the pandemic and which, as we have seen, is present throughout the standard: from its objectives to the adaptation of terminology, the identification of new uses and access to the library and, especially, the inclusion of new measures and data extraction sources for measuring digital services. In the latter case, it is foreseeable that these new measures will be incorporated into the corpus of the standard in future editions, once their use has been tested and consolidated in the operation of the library.

In addition to this impact on the content of the standard, it is worth highlighting the significant effort that has been made to analyse the diversity of the populations and users served by libraries, providing a conceptual framework as a basis for incorporating new statistics on equity, diversity and inclusion in future developments of the standard.

Finally, the inclusion of research support as a new library service and the need for a better understanding of the library’s user and non-user populations and users' activities are other milestones of the new standard contributions.