Everybody knows that maps are useful.

We use maps to navigate at sea, to find restaurants,  to illustrate history books,  to select routes,  to develop zoning plans – and for many, many  other purposes.

If the maps are wrong or out of date, however, we get into problems.  The restaurant has moved. The bridge is closed for repairs. The lake has turned into a swamp.

The quality of the map depends on the quality and the date of the mapping – and on the way the data are presented. To be useful, maps must be both correct and readable.

The same applies to statistics. Statistics are systematic quantitative data about (some part of) the world.

Demand for statistics

Everybody knows that producing good maps is hard work. The same is true of statistics. But governments have been willing to invest heavily in both areas. They need both statistics and maps for decision making, and create technical agencies to undertake the actual production of geographical and statistical data.

Such data can be useful for many purposes. Inside the library sector I would identify three main areas of use:

• statistics for library management
• statistics for library advocacy
• statistics for library research

The division into three areas – management, advocacy and research – is of course relevant in many other fields as well: museums and art galleries, schools and hospitals, sports and tourism.

Let me sum up. Statistics are produced for a purpose. The demand for statistics is shaped by the

• needs of government agencies for planning, evaluation and control of the library system
• needs of managers for  planning, evaluation and control of their own operations
• needs of advocates for convincing data about the services and impact of libraries
• needs of researchers for information about libraries as social institutions

Supply of statistics

Statistics are supplied (produced) by

• government information systems at the national and – sometimes – at  the regional or local level
• management information systems
• ad hoc projects conducted by
  • hired consultants
  • library teachers and their students
  • library staff

The IFLA Statistics and Evaluation Section is concerned with all aspects of supply and demand. The Statistics for advocacy project is focused on advocacy as a goal. But the way we use actual demand to define the specific need for data is relevant for all areas of use.

Statistical standards

Rules, standards, norms and regulations about library statistics may increase the value of statistics by making data comparable.  But standards must be intimately related to actual statistical practices. They are only useful if the people that produce library statistics

• accept the recommendations
• carry out comparisons
• learn from the results

Standards are made at meetings. The actual statistics are produced by practicing librarians – on the factory floor, so to speak. Standards are intended to regulate the production.

Many standards require additional work from the operating librarians. Therefore I think it fair that agencies which introduce standards also should demonstrate their practical value using empirical data.

By 2012, the Rwandan government wants every child between 9 and 13 to have a portable computer.

Each machine should have “an internet or intranet connection to download free educational software and electronic books“, explains the latest issue of The Economist (Upgrading the children, Dec. 5-11, p. 42). The program would cover 1.3 million kids – and the aim is to include the si-to-eight year olds by 2015.

They will start with one hundred thousand laptops bought from One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) – the charity headed by Nicholas Negroponte. Older digerati – a nicer word for nerd – remember him as author of Being Digital and head of the MIT Media Lab.

- By 2012 the Rwandans want to be supplied with more advanced laptops that OLPC is developing. These will be made from a single piece of plastic.

• They will be waterproof, harder to break, have colour screens, yet could cost as little as £75 each. …
• Schoolbooks, textbooks and applications would be stored in them, with screens designed to be readable in bright sunshine and to use minimal power in huts without electricity at night. …
• Software will eventually have to be written to link computers to omnipresent mobile phoenes.

I am writing this on a small and cheap ASUS – the best current price is about $250 – ten kilometers above Northern Germany – with the free word processing system offered by Google Docs.

I’m on my way to a meeting at IFLA, to plan a training program for libraries worldwide, with a dozen experts from the sector. The group includes librarians from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin and North America.

I use Google Gears, which means that all my text documents are stored on the computer and on the web at the same time. The nest time I access the web, at hotel IBIS in the Hague, Google Gears will synchronize my local documents with my documents stored on the web. I can share the web documents with specific people – identified by their e-mail addresses – and also define different levels of access: reading rights only or shared editing – or publish it for the whole wide world.

International education goes back to the Middle Ages, when Bologna, Montpellier and Paris were European centers og legal, medical and philosophical studies, respectively.  In the past I have had the good opportunity to teach in a variety of settings: a university in Mexico City, a professional college next to Kilimanjaro, a  Buddhist temple near Bangkok.

But the IFLA meeting – and the news from Rwanda – are signals that something fundamental is happening in global education. Cheap computers, free software, integrated on- and off-line acces: this is appropriate educational technology for the early 21st century. The next step is to explore appropriate ways of teaching, learning and educational design with the new technology.

LATINA was born as a training course.

In 2008, Oslo University College started a summer school – lasting three weeks – for an international group of students. The people behind LATINA – Helge Høivik, Lars Egeland and Tord Høivik – designed the course as a web-oriented learning environment.

We have worked with digital tools in education for several decades. But the years after 2005 open totally new posssibilities of integrating web resources, portable computers and audio-visual tools in knowledge production. Through LATINA, we wanted to give students and teachers the chance to explore the new forms of learning and teaching.

Productions

Today, we can look back on five LATINA productions:

1. the first LATINA summer course 2008 – three intensive weeks
2. the LATINA spring course 2009 – three dispersed weeks combined with individual study
3. the second LATINA summer course 2009 – three intensive weeks
4. a digital dissemination course for museum pedagogues in the autumn 2009 – three dispersed weeks combined with individual study (conducted in Norwegian)
5. a six week internship program for five Erasmus Mundus students from Akershus University College in the autumn 2009

We have just started a five year work/study programme for librarians with a master degree (half time study) – and are planning

1. a one week training course for Nordic librarians in Finland in June 2010
2. a third LATINA summer course 2010 – three intensive weeks

Working with diversity

We work with people from many different countries and with widely different skills in English. This is typical of many international courses. As more and more students are expected to study abroad, our linguistic environment is becoming more and more heterogeneous.

This diversity can be met in two ways: by standardization or by inclusion. We may (try to) restrict the intake to students with fluent English – or prepare for a wide range of English language skills.

Since we need to communicate with all participants, we must require some knowledge of English. But in LATINA we aim to develop resources and ways of working that allow students to much of the work in their own languages.

In the summer of 2008, the class had two important language groups besides English: four Chinese participants using Mandarin and three participants from Sudan having Arabic as their shared language. The 2009 spring course included a group of Norwegian college teachers and four young students from China. The 2009 summer course included three who spoke Mandarin,  three with Polish and two who could communicate in Ukrainian – one from the country itself and one Tanzanian who studied there.  The interns all had a good mastery of English, but their regular working languages were French (2), Spanish (2) and Polish (1).

The story does not end there, however. The Polish intern spoke excellent Spanish. The French speakers had learned French at school. At home – in Benin and the Ivory Coast – they grew up speaking several local languages. – The official language is French, wrote one of them - but we also have more than 40 local languages. In addition to French and English, I also speak some local languages. In this case, some equalled four – with Yoruba as the main one. The other African intern spoke “only” Senoufo and Bambara.

Translations

In LATINA, we have used this range of language skills to explore the role of translation and interpretation in individual and collective learning. Immediately after the 2009 summer course, we organized a one week translation workshop where some of the participants translated central LATINA educational resources into Spanish, Polish and Ukrainian. These will be used in connection with the 2010 course, and are also available for free non-commercial re-use by educators in general.

In the autumn 2009, the interns were asked to translate a general article (10 pages) about LATINA into French, Spanish and Polish. At the same time, they should observe and reflect on their use of Google Translate – using their blogs to document their thinking. The end result will be a collective paper on translation as a learning activity – based on their shared experiences working on the same text.

Statistical advocacy

The demand for multilingual training crops up in many different settings. The International Federation of Library Associations – IFLA – is developing a series of one-day courses for librarians worldwide. The courses are developed in English, but will later be conducted in  many different languages – starting with some of the official IFLA idioms: Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic and Chinese.

I am coordinating the development work for one of these courses – the one dealing with statistical advocacy. And if that term does not sound a bell – you may read all about it on the GLOSSA blog … The LATINA principles – or rather practices – are very appropriate to this up-and-coming course.

The GLOSSA blog is meant to be bilingual in English and Spanish – and one of our interns has done a great job translating central posts and pages into Spanish. After a planning meeting in the Hague, in early December, we now plan three multilingual events in 2010:

1. a pilot course in Poland in the spring 2010 (English/Polish)
2. a “stream” devoted to library statistics within the LATINA summer course in July 2010
3. a series of parallell workshops at the IFLA Congress in Gothenburg August 2010 (see Appendix)
   • English – of course
   • Spanish – definitely
   • Scandinavian – probably
   • French – possibly

This means that we get the chance to try out our training materials and approach with participants from different linguistic communities.

Resources

Plinius in English

• PS 8/09: LATINA/lingua
• PL 66/09: French, Polish and Spanish. Introductions to LATINA in three languages
• PL  65/09: Plan for Erasmus Mundus. New trainees from Benin, Cuba, the Ivory Coast, Poland and Venezuela
• PL 45/09. Translations from LATINA. Resources in four scripts and five languages.
• PL 3/09. Multilingual learning. Google Translate sets the pace.

Plinius in Norwegian

• P 142/09: Rapport fra LATINA/lingua. Flere språk i omløp
• SK 19/09. LATINA – et nytt læringsmiljø. Digital pedagogikk i praksis.
• P 22/09. Når utdanning blir global. Fire mediastudenter fra Kina blir med på LATINA Spring.
• P 3/09. Flerkulturell julegave. LATINA skal utvikle materiell på flere språk.
• P 167/08. Bibliotekutvikling i Sudan. Høyere utdanning skal bygges opp etter tjue års borgerkrig.
• P 154/08. Bibliotekarer på LATINA. To biblioteklærere fra Kroatia deltar – og blogger om erfaringene.
• P 153/08. LATINA på Nilen. Tre av deltakerne kommer fra. Upper Nile University i Sør-Sudan – som har et tett samarbeid med Høgskolene i Oslo og Akershus
• P 150/08. LATINA på mange språk. Nytt sommerkurs om e-læring og digitale bibliotek i full gang

APPENDIX

At the SES meeting in Milan in August, we decided to offer a one-day off-site workshop on library statistics during the IFLA congress in Gothenburg (Aug. 10-15, 2010). It will be on one of the main conference days (no pre or post) and will be planned by a group consisting of: Frankie Wilson (chair), Wanda Dole, Colleen Cook, Ulla Wimmer and Tord Høivik.

The workshop will be based on the work package for the capacity building workshops (GLOSSA) developed by then. There should be ca. 5 parallel workshops so that ca. 100 attendants can be accomodated. Workshop languages should be English, French, Spanish and possibly other IFLA Languages. The workshop should be promoted to Management of Library Associations Section and National Libraries Section to enhance attendance.

Expert meeting agenda. GLOSSA blog Nov. 30, 2009

Our LATINA trainees are working hard and learning fast.

The whale is from Adelaide- and Lidia’s post tells why.

I have asked Lidia, from Poland, to be “in charge of” their blogging – which means to respond, reflect and motivate rather than handing out tasks. She wrote a very interesting post about her experiences during the last four weeks — and here is my comment:

- I think you are doing exactly what you “should” be doing: using the blog as a ladder. Everybody has to start from wherever they happen to be.

Since we document our thinking and feeling, we can go back and build on the past. We also see the change in our own way of dealing with things over time – learning in action, so to speak. More steps on the ladder ….

When I blog, I know it will be read by some dozens or hundreds of people – and that the text will remain on the web. That helps me take myself a bit more serioously – without becoming serious about it …

Blogs represent a new – and highly flexible – literary form. Like poetry, for that matter. Or song. We don’t learn singing by five years of reading, listening and writing – and then bursting into O Sole Mio after the final examination. We find – and develop – our voice by using it.

Paper (or rather publishers) separate training (writing drafts) and and public presentation. The web removes the technical barrier to immediate publication. As blog writers we become our own publishers – and should be aware of that.

We can use publicity to write – and to think through writing – in a more disciplined (not rigid) way – and select the degree of intimacy we want,

Resources

• PS 7/09. Blogging in context. Using blogs in teaching and learning.
• PL 66/09: French, Polish and Spanish. Introductions to LATINA in three languages
• PL  65/09: Plan for Erasmus Mundus. New trainees from Benin, Cuba, the Ivory Coast, Poland and Venezuela
• PL 58/09. Blogging bounty. When will the world’s bloggers be properly rewarded for their (our) tremendous contribution to peace, science, democracy and international library statistics?
• PL 57/09. IFLA blogging 2009. Variable blogging – but massive twittering – in Milan.
• PL 19/09. Private, personal, public. Blogs move boundaries, but do not abolish them.
• PL 11/09. Blogging and pictures from Porto.
• PL 10/09. Live blogging from Porto
• PL 2/09. IFLA blogging most popular,  Visits to Plinius in 2008.

The first contribution from our Erasmus Mundus trainees is a set of translations – that present LATINA in three different languages.

Latin used to be the language of Latium – a small region in the middle of Italy.

The village of Rome became the capital of the Roman empire, and Latin became the adminisitrative language of tens of millions of people. In the Middle Ages you were not educated unless you could read and speak Latin. Latin played – roughly – the same role in medieval Europe as English does in the modern world.

The scholars all spoke Latin. But among ordinary people Latin developed into several related languages. Five of them become the national languages of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Romania. Others became regional languages or dialects, like Catalan, Romansh and Neapolitan.

In LATINA, we use English as our basic shared language. But we also try to include a broader linguistic perspective. People and groups express their identity and culture through their language – or languages. To learn and teach together, we need a common ground. But we also want to accept, to appreciate and to include the diversity of languages in our project.

With LATINA/lingua we make LATINA teaching resourses available in other languages. This week the students have translated the presentation article Learning with LATINA into French, Polish and Spanish. Next week we will discuss and document the process of translation.

A group of five Erasmus Mundus students at Akershus University College will be working as interns with LATINA/lab in November.

In this project the interns will work on the development of teaching materials in English – as well as on translations into Spanish, Polish and French – for the LATINA summer school. This includes the development of a course module for a training course in evidence-based advocacy based on library statistics.

As an introduction, I’ve summarized the project setting:

LATINA
Learning and Teaching in a Digital World is

• an adult education concept
• aimed at students and teachers throughout the world
• to support their passage from the industrial to the digital economy
• by intensive practical exposure
• to digital forms of teaching, learning and production
• in a well-designed learning environment
• that combines appropriate technical resources
• with a strong and supportive social atmosphere

The project itself is developed through

• a development oriented workshop – the LATINA/lab – located at the OUC Learning Centre
• an annual LATINA Summer course, as part of the Oslo University College Summer School (2008-)
• other courses based on the LATINA model during the terms (LATINA Spring 2009, Museum course Autumn 2009)
• a five-year “professional doctorate” program (half speed) for librarians
• other training or trainee programs
• international courses (Finland 2010, Botswana 2011)
• collaboration with institutions in China and Poland

GLOSSA
The Global Statistics for Advocacy sub-project is

• a training program
• aimed at library associations throughout the world
• to develop their ability to “argue with numbers”
• vis-a-vis politicians, publics, and administrations
• in order to promote the development
• of public, school, and academic libraries
• by demonstrating the social, economic and cultural value of their services

The project itself will be developed through

• a multilingual project blog (GLOSSA)
• an set of web-based open educational resources (OER)
• a twelve person expert meeting in the Hague on December 8-10
• a pilot course planned for Poland in the spring 2010
  • materials in English and Polish
• a one-day module at the LATINA Summer course 2010
  • materials in English, Spanish, French and Polish (?)
• a full-day workshop with five parallell courses planned for the main IFLA conference in Gothenburg in August 2010
  • materials in English, Spanish and French (?)

Goals

The aim of the internship period is

• To participate in ongoing development projects (LATINA, GLOSSA, …) as producers
• To learn to work in the “LATINA mode”
  • systematic use of cloud-based digital tools
  • value-added reuse
  • rapid publication (early beta)
  • group oriented
  • process oriented
• To get an understanding of how such projects emerge and develop – including the different interests that surround them
• To reflect on, share reflections on and document what they are learning through the work of translation and realted tasks

Resources

A more detailed work plan – as of Nov. 3, 2009 – is here.

People in villages need trade more than aid.

Peasants without information about the market, are squeezed by middle-men.  Small entrepreneurs need capital in order to get started. Secure and low-cost money transfers allow urban workers to send funds to their rural families without several days of travel. Cheap mobile phones in the South provide answers to these, and many other, questions.

The growth of mobile networks and ownership of phones since 2000 has been amazing. Today, about 3.5 billion people have mobile phones. The latest issue of The Economist has an excellent special report on telecoms in emerging markets. Instead of reading, you may also listen to a brief lecture – with animated graphics – covering the highlights. There is lot of local detail, from the phone ladies of Bangladesh to phone-based micro-banking in Kenya.

The phone ladies got loans from Grameen bank to buy their phones. They could normally repay their loans with rental fees in less than year – and the phones gave them a stable source of income for a much longer period.

A World Bank study shows that local access to information and capital has a clear positive impact on GDP. When Kay Raseroka from Botswana was president of IFLA (2003-2005), she wanted libraries in the South to play the same role as rural communication hubs.

This idea is even more valid now – and should be including in the planning for the GLOSSA project – Global statistics for advocacy.

Quotes

• Mobile broadband …  will be the dominant form of broadband, says Informa’s Mr Jotischky.
• With the falling price and size of laptops and the advancing potential of mobile phones, the two seem to be converging in a new range of devices that combine the power and versatility of a computer with the portability of  a  phone. Already, netbooks can cost as little as $200
• Mobile phones,  it  seems,  are  the  advance guard  for  mobile broadband networks that will extend  internet access to the whole of mankind.
• Mobile phones are now seen as a vital  tool of development, whereas Mr  Negroponte’s  laptop project  [OLPC] has  failed  to  meet  its  ambitious goals.
• But although his engineers have so far only managed to get the cost of their elegant laptop  down to about $150,  they have shown what is possible with a lowcost design, and helped create today’s vibrant netbook market.
• Technological progress in devices and networks seems to have rendered the debate moot: the important thing is that internet access will be on its way to becoming as widespread as mobile phones.
• Obstacles remain even to universal mobile access, and beyond that to universal internet access.
• One problem is a lack of backbone links, particularly to Africa. But a series of new cables is in the works to improve Africa’s connectivity with the rest of the world, increasing capacity and reducing the cost of internet access. The †first of these, the SEACOM cable, eastern Africa’s first modern submarine cable, was completed in July.
• As international links improve and network equipment becomes cheaper and more eff…ective, it will not be diˆcult to provide a low cost mobile broadband service.
• The main challenge will be to reduce the price of access devices. ŒWe need to come up with a mobiledata device  that  costs  $60-80 maximum,
• Netbooks are very good, but we need an emergingmarket netbook that  costs  onethird of  the  price.  With phones, he observes, Œwe got real penetration when we got  below  $35.  Netbooks must be below $100 in price to get real traction.
• The internet equivalent of the village phone model could provide a stepping stone to wider internet access in the poorest  areas,  just  as  village phones did for telephony.
• The Grameen Foundation has already experimented by giving netbooks to a few village phone operators in Uganda so that they can sell internet access as well as telephony.,
• Access to the internet can provide an even bigger boost to economic growth than access to mobile phones.
• To make the most of the internet, users have to have a certain level of education and literacy.
• It is now clear that the long process of connecting everyone on Earth to a global telecommunications network,  which  began with the invention of the telegraph in 1791, is on the verge of being completed.

Resources

• Documentary about mobile phone culture in Africa (42 min)

The first historical use of iron for tools and weapons undermined the social structures – read power and prestige – based on bronze. No more palaces in Crete.

The industrial use of iron for tools and transport destroyed dominion based on land. Power and prestige rushed to the cities.

The internet is equally powerful. It will destroy the social institutions whose main purpose is physical mediation of otherwise interested but unconnected parties.

From conduit to barrier

Over time, those middle layers will simply go away - Quinn Norton writes. They have to, because they are transformed (through no fault of their own) from conduit to barrier.

Spain has an important library community.

The sculpture (right) is called El Alma del Ebro. It consists of letters …
Alma means soul and the river Ebro gave its name to the Iberic Peninsula and its peoples.

In 2006, the country reported

• one national library
• seven central Autonomous Community libraries
• 317 specific-user-group libraries,
• 334 higher education institution libraries
• 1,749 specialised libraries,
• 4,115 public libraries

Visits and loans

• The number of visitors [visits] reached 195 million – or an average of 4.42 visits per inhabitant in 2006.
• Users borrowed 68 million documents, or an average of 1.55 units per person.
• Books constituted 64% of the total.
  • These were followed by audiovisual (19%), audio (9%) and electronic (3%) items.
• The total size of the library collection was 219 million documents
  • TH: Since the press release I quote does not distinguish between the activities of public and other types of libraries, there is no point in calculating turnover rates.

Digital services

• Eighty-six percent of the libraries had Internet access
• Seventy-four percent had computers for public use
• Sixty-eight percent had automated catalogues
• Fifty percent had automated lending
• Twenty-one percent had their own web site

Staff

• There were nearly 23,500 members of staff
  • 6,900 were professional librarians
  • 9,100 were library assistants
  • 7,400 were specialists and other staff
• In addition, another 3,800 people worked with libraries as interns and as volunteers

Source

• Libraries Statistics. Year 2006

Resources

• PL 38/09. A story from Spain. Education is changing in many countries
• PL 33/09. Ten European city libraries. Data from the Tibidabo project.
• PL 30/09. ICT and global learning. Resource links from China, Hungary and Spain.

APPENDIX

National level

• 1.55 loans and 4.42 visits per inhabitant in 2006 (all types of libraries)

Regions

Above 2.00 loans per capita

• 2.79 and 4.68 – Castilla y León
• 2.35 and 4.36 – Castilla-La Mancha
• 2.33 and 5.80 – Cataluña
• 2.27 and 3.06 – Aragón 2
• 2.12 and 6.93 – Navarra (C. Foral de)

From 1.50 to 1.99 loans per capita

• 1.89 and 5.05 – Madrid (Comunidad de)
• 1.82 and 4.12 – Asturias (Principado de)
• 1.73 and 5.33 – Rioja (La)
• 1.53 and 2.94 – País Vasco

From 1.00 to 1.49 loans per capita

• 1.19 and 4.89 – Murcia (Región de)
• 1.16 and 3.57 – Extremadura
• 1.13 and 2.69 – Balears (Illes)
• 1.09 and 4.86 – Galicia
• 1.01 and 3.77 – Comunitat Valenciana

Less than 1.00 loans per capita

• 0.90 and 6.86 – Cantabria
• 0.74 and 3.70 – Andalucía
• 0.67 and 3.43 – Canarias
• 0.24 and 0.72 – Melilla
• 0.09 and 0.38 – Ceuta

The registered number of visits is surprisingly high relative to the number of loans …

In Milan, the Statistics and Evaluation Section set up a small working group to help IFLA develop a course package on statistics for advocacy.

The hotel Acapulco Princess (right) evidently “quotes” the great Mexican pyramids.

Since 2004 the Section has worked hard to establish library statistics as a necessary and important component of cultural and educational statistics. The advocacy project builds on this work, which culminated in a conference in Montreal in 2008 (which I attended) and a volume of conference proceedings.

The task is not easy. We want to train library – or library association staff – to argue with statistics. Understanding and measuring the impact of libraries is a professional task which requires a combination of library expertise and some understanding of practical sociology and statistics.

Scattered results

Such impact studies are not well established anywhere. Even in highly developed library environments – like Finland, Denmark, Great Britain and the United States – we lack solid documentation on a broad front. There are many smaller studies, but these tend to be scattered and ad hoc.

But the interest in documented contributions to social change is increasing.

In Great Britain and the United States, systematic efforts to draw conclusions from the smaller studies (meta-analyses) are appearing. Our project is another example. In several countries – Lithuania, Poland, Romania – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has initiated impact assessment projects in connection with its Global Libraries initiative. I see these as vital contribution to the field of quantitative assessment – which can support more political and strategic arguments.

Statistics in the South

The moment we move beyond the high industrial North, the basic conditions for statistical work changes, however. Let me take an example from Mexico – where I did some socio-demographic studies once upon a time – as a very young researcher (1969/70!).

In Mexico the national statistical authority – Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGO) -  has published a table showing the number of public libraries by state from 2004 to 2008. These numbers look quite problematic.

Both the total number of libraries – and the numbers for every single state – are listed as identical in 2004, 2007 and 2008. The 2008 data are described as estimates – and probably just repeat the 2007 column.

But when the 2005 and 2006 statistics differ somewhat from 2004 in every single state except Tabasco – and rebound to their 2004 values in 2008, I conclude that the 2008 data must be based on 2004 rather than on actual data collection.

How trustworthy the 2004 – and for that matter the 2005-2006 data are, I do not know.

Mexico

• 2004 – 7.211 public libraries
• 2005 – 6.810
• 2006 – 7.010
• 2007 – 7.211
• 2008 – 7.211 [est.]

Veracruz

• 2004 – 508 public libraries
• 2005 – 477
• 2006 – 485
• 2007 – 508
• 2008 – 508 [est.]

Tabasco

• 2004 – 563 public libraries
• 2005 – 563
• 2006 – 563
• 2007 – 563
• 2008 – 563 [est.]

Note

The Working Group consists of Colleen Cook (US), Toni Feliu Oller (Spain) and Tord Høivik (Norway, chair). If you want to follow our work, I recommend visiting – or even subscribing to – the project blog.

Resources

• Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGO). Wikipedia. Spanish
• Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGO). Wikipedia. English