Winter Insitute on Statistical Literacy for Librarians 2009

The University of Alberta Libraries will be hosting its third Winter Institute on Statistical Literacy for Librarians from February 18-20, 2009. This training event will provide strategies and skills for finding, evaluating and retrieving published statistics and will be useful to information professionals working in academic, public and special libraries.

This workshop will not provide instruction about how to do data analysis, although some examples will include the use of data to demonstrate how statistics are produced.

The instructional focus is on making digitally published statistics more accessible as information to librarians and their patrons. The topics to be covered include:

- A framework for thinking about published statistics
- How statistics and data are related
- Statistical definitions, standards and classifications
- Metadata for statistical displays
- How official and non-official statistics are produced
- Evaluating statistics and statistical sources
- Tools and strategies for locating statistics
- Citation standards for statistics
- Geographical and spatial representation of statistics
- Addressing the challenge of finding statistics for small geographic areas

The conference is restricted to 30 participants on a first-come, first-serve basis. The registration fee is $250 and includes continental breakfast, coffee breaks and lunch.

For more information and to register, visit http://wisll.library.ualberta.ca