PLANS FOR A NEW SYSTEM OF BUSINESS STATISTICS

Abstract

It is flattering that a statistician should be asked to address a gathering of librarians. In Five Orange Pips Sherlock Holmes remarks that a man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture he is likely to use and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library where he can get it if he wants it. I have no view about Conan Doyle's definition of a library as a lumber room, but certainly I find the little brain attics of librarians well stocked with one of the two branches of epistemology, as Dr Johnson defined them: ‘Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information about it’. I pay tribute to the ability of librarians to find information about statistics, despite what must occasionally seem to them the perverse ingenuity with which statisticians make the task difficult. It is easy enough to find United Kingdom statistics. There are an infinity of them—in the Digests of Statistics, of Financial Statistics, of Regional Statistics, and so on. The trouble is that those who inquire of you usually want a particular statistic—although the phrase ‘any figures will do’ is one which is not unfamiliar to me. To find in the forest of United Kingdom figures the particular sapling which a researcher is seeking is sometimes far from easy. My experience is that the librarians know their way about the lumber at least as well as we statisticians do.

Citation

FESSEY, M.C. (1970), "PLANS FOR A NEW SYSTEM OF BUSINESS STATISTICS", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 22 No. 7, pp. 309-319. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb050247