Ok, I bet most of you librarians knew about this resource already, but for a rookie MLIS student, it was new to me. As I played around and perused the various links, it occurred to me what a great resource this would be for those who are applying for jobs in public libraries. After all, when one is applying for a job at a library, they should definitely do their research about it! This site can provide that information for you. Want to know how many librarians at a specific public library have their MLIS? Need to know information about circulation statistics or total expenditures? Other items of interest you can discover: information on employee benefits, salaries and wages expenditures, operating revenue and expenditures, organizational characteristics, size of collection, and types of services.

Furthermore, if you’re curious about the differences between libraries, this site allows the ability to compare them! I tried it out by comparing two libraries within 15 miles of one another: Corvallis-Benton County Public Library and the Albany Public Library. You can choose all sorts of variables, in this particular example, I only chose one variable (local revenue).

What’s even more exciting is that one can create reports based on this information and download the data into an Excel spreadsheet. So Groovy!