This post had two inspirations: First, I was scrolling around the IPEDS data center one night, looking for something to visualize that I hadn't before that I thought would be interesting. I scrolled through all the variables, and found the Academic Libraries section. I was certain that I had never even looked at the data, so put it in the back of my mind. The second thing that led me to this data was thinking about my discussions with high school counselors after they come back from campus tours: Just how often they've heard the same things from tour guides who are quite convinced the counselors have never heard it before (the blue safety lights comes to mind, along with the perfunctory mention of the number of books in the library.) The latter is not an unimportant statistic, of course, as the library has long been at the heart of the intellectual life of an institution dedicated to intellectual pursuits. But what do those numbers mean? Are comparisons between institutions