Ramblings on libraries and life upon the wicked stage

As a librarian, information is my “thing”. The teaching that I do is as much about evaluating sources of information as it is about finding them. And so, I find bad information, fake news and misleading social media posts to be really irritating.

I see a lot of bad information and fake news on Facebook, but I don’t always challenge it. That would be a full-time job. But this morning, I did challenge something, because it was particularly ridiculous.

I am not going to share the post that wound me up, because I don’t want to propagate it further, hence the “fake news” image. It consisted of a bar graph showing “Disease deaths per day worldwide”. COVID-19 is a way down the image with a figure of 56. An arrow points to it with text reading “THIS is what collapsed the world economy”. Alarm bells rang instantly, and a couple of other people had commented on the post already asking when it was from. The person who had shared it did not know, so I thought I’d do some digging.

First, I took a look at the reported deaths from COVID-19. Statista gave a figure of 757, 471 deaths to 14th August. The WHO has a slightly lower figure of 757,154. If you divide this by the number of days in the year so far, you get either 3,194 or 3,196 deaths per day. Incidentally, this is higher than any of the other figures on the viral post (the highest is tuberculosis, with 3,014). Even if you assume no more deaths will occur for the rest of the year, it would still work out as over 2,000 per day, around the same as the figure for malaria.

This did not answer the question of when the figure of 56 deaths per day worldwide would be from. So I took a look back, using the WHO’s daily situation reports. There are, of course, issues with these reports, as different countries report in slightly different ways with different lengths of delay, but they are the best data I had to work with. According to the WHO, at the end of February, there had been a total of 86 deaths reported worldwide, but by end of March it was over 36,000 and worked out at 400 per day. The last day that I went to work on campus was 18th March, a week before the UK’s national lockdown. I did the calculation for that date – 100 per day. By my reckoning, the last possible date when the figure could have been true would have been 15th March.

I then grew curious about the other figures given in the viral post. Were they accurate. The first alarm bell is that most of these sorts of figures are only available retrospectively – there are very few diseases for which anyone keeps a daily global tally. Generally, such statistics are collated and released after year end. So it seemed unlikely that they were up-to-date stats from 2020. But were they accurate at all?

Surprisingly, yes. I did a few spot checks on the higher totals by finding reported yearly deaths from various diseases and dividing those totals by the number of days in that year. They checked out, roughly. I wasn’t able to identify the exact year in most cases, but they were in the right ball park.

But then I looked further down the list at the diseases with lower figures than COVID-19 and found SARS was listed there. I was fairly confident that there has not been a SARS outbreak recently, but wanted to be sure, so I checked the WHO, the CDC and a number of other sources. Indeed, no outbreak since 2004. The low figure given did match up to the 2002-2003 outbreak, but at this point it was clear that the data was a complete hodge-podge from different years and not worth anyone’s time.

My Facebook friend who shared the post had done it with the best of intentions – to spark a debate about whether it was accurate. But it still concerns me when such obviously bad information is shared, hence not sharing or linking to it here.

I would agree that there are numerous issues with COVID-19 data, particularly how it is counted and categorised, and there are absolutely arguments to be had about the economic impact of measures against COVID-19, not to mention education, societal and mental health impacts. But these figures were not the way to do it.

I seem to have subscribed, accidentally, to the paranoid school of librarianship.  This means that, despite my ‘nice feedback’ folder of job-related positive emails and despite coming up to 2 years in post, I end up worrying more and more.  The worst manifestation of this occurs if I have a meeting with people from outside the library, particularly one that’s not part of the regular routine of my job.  I often enter the room fearing that someone is going to turn round and tell me I’m doing a terrible job and they wish they had a different librarian.  Days with multiple meetings are therefore extremely tense.

For the most part, meetings are actually rather positive.  I know (and the students and academic staff know) that there are limits to the wonders I can achieve, but most groups seem quite happy with the work that I do.  Some courses are a little less reluctant to work with the library than others, but I have only ever had one student outright say that I personally was doing a bad job, and that was (I think) at least partly a reaction to me refusing to break the law for him.  I’m annoying like that, you see.

Having spent much of the week in impending doom mode, I had a revelation on Friday afternoon that the groups of people I find it hardest to work with tend not to work well with anyone outside of their group anyway.  Which is fair enough – people who we perceive as “other” in some fundamental way, not in terms of race or sexuality so much as in terms of being in some sense “like me”, can be hard to understand, due to having minds that work in very different ways.  Different, not better or worse.  And it works both ways – I need to see their worldview in order to help them see a bit of mine.

I also thought it was about time to go through my ‘nice feedback’ folder again.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to regurgitate it all here, but the first and last items in there are wonderfully different.  The most recent is from the end of October, from an international organisation.  Some librarians from Nigeria had been visiting them, and as our library was nearby, they came for a tour.  As they were interested in web 2.0 and its possibilities in libraries, I was tracked down and asked to speak to them.  My manager forwarded the subsequent letter sent by their organisation to me as it included this :

I would particularly like to thank [the Singing Librarian] for the talk he gave at such short notice.  This was delivered very well…

Aw, thank you!

The earliest item in there is from around 4 months after I started in the post, just after my first new intake of students and therefore my first intensive round of planned lectures, workshops and the like.  Our library holds a user group, and I received an email after this informing me that a member of staff wanted to minute that the

students were singing your praises about the support that they had received from you at their workshops and when they have called into the library to see you.

Which is nice.  It is relatively rare for the role of the library and its staff to be acknowledged officially, apart from when things go wrong.  I am lucky to work, across the 3 universities my role covers, with some exceptional people who do brilliant work.

So why have I written this blog post after yet another long silence?  Well, regular readers will know that my confidence levels are subject to many fluctuations and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.  I wanted to recommend a ‘nice feedback’ or ‘lovely emails’ folder for everyone – you can’t be perfect all the time (and I am well aware of the aspects of my job which I’m still not great at), but it’s good to be able to remind yourself of the positives if you tend to accentuate the negative.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a bunch of other nice messages to read through…