Real-Life Math
Even though librarians are surrounded by millions of words, numbers
also play a big role in their work. Librarians need to order books, calculate
late fines and control budgets.
Math skills are especially important
for librarians who are library directors. This is the top management role
in a library.
"I use our bookkeeping software almost daily and prepare
monthly management reports to monitor trends and variances in spending,"
says Ed Goyda, a library director.
"A grasp of statistics is necessary
to detect and respond to trends, and evidence-based decision making is critical
to determining organizational direction."
Imagine that you work at
the Bear State College Library. It's like any other library -- always getting
more and more books. What are you going to do with them all? At every library,
there comes a time when the shelves are bulging at the seams.
Do you
get rid of some of your 300,000 books or build a bigger library?
Of
course, the only answer for any book lover is to renovate the library. But
that's not so easy. You have to calculate how much more space you will need,
how you will move all the books to another location and how much it's going
to cost.
Here's the situation:
- You have 10,500 feet of shelving right now, but it's entirely full of
books. In order to make the new shelves three-quarters full with the same
amount of books, how many extra feet of shelving are you going to need?
- The contractors charge $20 for each foot of new shelving.
How much will the new shelves cost?
- You've figured out how much new shelving you're going to need, but now
you've got to move the books out of the way -- or rather, you've got to hire
some students to move the books. It's going to take 30 students working 20
hours per weekend over 7 weekends to move the books. They will earn $9 per
hour. How much will you have to pay the students?
- At the end of the summer when the renovations are finished, a fresh batch
of students will have to move the entire library back into place. Thirty students
will work 150 hours each for $9 per hour. How much will this cost?
How much will it cost to renovate the library in total?