Ask Slashdot: Statistical Analysis Packages For Libraries? 146
HolyLime writes "I'm a librarian in a small academic library. Increasingly the administration is asking our department to collect data on various aspects of our activities, class taught, students helped, circulation, collection development, and so on. This is generating a large stream of data that is making it difficult, and time consuming, to qualitatively analyze. For anything complicated, I currently use excel, or an analogous spreadsheet program. I am aware of statistical analysis programs, like SPSS or SAS. Can anyone give me recommendations for statistical analysis programs? I also place emphasis on anything that is open source and easy to implement since it will allow me to bypass the convoluted purchase approval process."
Stick with Excel (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, stick with Excel. You and anyone who comes after you would need to learn whatever statistical package you introduce. That is either overkill for the kind of data you're collecting and analysing, or it's a full time job requiring specialist knowledge for which they should be hiring someone else.
Excel has a few bugs but for the most part it's very capable. Ensure you run the service packs and can install the addons that come with it (analysis pack). Get them to send you on advanced short courses for Excel and Statistics. If there isn't that kind of commitment there's no room for any statistical package.
Almost all ask slashdot stories that are work related can be answered the same way - bad idea: you're already out of your depth and if you can't be bothered to google for the information the project is doomed.
Re:R or WEKA ... Wait, What Exactly Are You Doing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Easy of deployment does NOT leave out open source. Ease of deployment simply depends on how the package was programmed. Many closed software are just as hard to deploy as open source. Saying you must buy software is useless without actually giving information out on the general field of statisical analysis like various options and comparisons between closed sourced and open.
As for support. It's true open source generally has limited support but often enough it's enough since many closed software also provide limited or slow support unless your one of their larger customers. Also, sometimes you can find companys to pay for support when dealing with open source software. Simply speaking, support varies GREATLY depending on the software in question be it open or closed source. Note, however, he did NOT mention anything about his requirements in terms of software support so whether the issue of support exists is up in the air.
This is also a library probably with limited funds. Organizations like these can take insane amount of time before software is approved when not even factoring in that the software can easily be rejected. While is true open source doesn't mean free, it might as well in the majority of cases. Most software that are open sourced often release the binaries for free (companies like cedega are in the extreme minority where they hide access to the source and charge for the binary). If a open source product can meet his requirements, why shouldn't he go with it? Both open and closed source take time to deploy and the amount of time spent trying to get a closed software to be approved can also be spent on deployment an open sourced software.
*Note, I don't advocate open vs closed source. I'm just speaking for this specific case. If closed software fits and is less hassle, go for it. If open source fits and easier to deploy (be it deployment or approval), go for that instead. Really depends on the requiresments. Software are tools, use the one that fits best for your needs.
Re:R or WEKA ... Wait, What Exactly Are You Doing? (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, you're not quite correct. The head of our statisticians wants to get R in here to supplement SAS (which we pay a lot of money for) because it is both good software, and also being used heavily for research. As he put it "If we started using R, we could start using new tools as soon as we read the paper, since most of the researchers are using R."
What is your Integrated Library System? (Score:2, Insightful)
What is your ILS? Depending on what it is, you may already have access to just about all of what you need there along with Excel. Atriuum from Booksys has wonderful features like you are asking about, record tracking, and it exports to Excel very well. Voyager from Ex Libris had wonderful integration with Access and my boss could pull out some amazing statistics with it.
If you don't have an ILS then seriously look at Atriuum as they are great for the smaller libraries.
lordjim AT gmail DOT com
Re:R or WEKA ... Wait, What Exactly Are You Doing? (Score:2, Insightful)
I was at a "Large Data Sets" conference where there was an awkard pissing contest over who had the biggest data set. Then it became a question of whether you had to time-adjust the size of a data set, since a megabyte data set used to be huge. Then someone pointed out that large is relative; what is a large data set for a stats student (or librarian) is trivial for people working on the largest of the day, but it is still large for that person. I don't know what the OP is analyzing, but for them, this is large AND it fits in Excel. (And, since an Excel sheet expended from 2^24 to 2^34 cells, it now can hold a fairly large amount).
TL;DR: "Large" is a matter of perspective, so don't think Excel makes it a small data set.