Here are the full annual statistics from fiscal year 2026 (the 2025/26 academic year) for several of the Gardner-Harvey Library's (GHL) services. We hope you will find them useful to see how people use the library.
We were open from 8am to 5pm Monday through Friday year round (semesters and breaks). Face to face courses at Middletown decreased to 96 in 2025/2026 from 144 in 2024/2025, and faculty members largely moved to the Hamilton campus by year's end, so we saw fewer individual students and faculty on campus and therefore in the library. We have a strong group of regular users, though, particularly from the Early College Academy (ECA) cohort on campus, and that kept things lively.
These statistics reflect what happened between July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026. Some stats we keep locally, others we pull from university-wide or OhioLINK-wide systems, and some are provided by database vendors.
Read on for full details on these and other activities.
On Average
Taking the statistics below and guesstimating a total Middletown community of 1000 students, faculty and staff members (also including community patrons), here's what can be said about the average person on campus. She:
- checks out over three items from the library each year (reserves and local/MU/OhioLINK collection items)
- visits the library nearly 18 times per year
- accesses the library web site nine times per year.
- participates in a library instruction session or an embedded librarian course once every two years (if she is a student).
Now on to the detailed analysis!
Both a Borrower and a Lender Be
- In the first full year of our new catalog and backend system (Miami University Libraries Search and ALMA), our stats reporting has changed. Some statistics may be compared with that of past years, and others may not, which you'll note below.
- Patrons checked out 1187 books and DVDs from the GHL collection.
- Patron at Middletown requested 119 items from other Miami campuses (an increase of 183% over 2024/25) and 81 items from OhioLINK libraries (a 13% decrease from 2024/25).
- GHL sent 928 items to OhioLINK users (a 10% decrease from 2024/25) and 566 items other MU libraries (an 82% increase over 2024/25).
- GHL patrons checked out 2236 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed course reserves, textbooks on reserve, study rooms, laptops, and other equipment). That is an 11% increase over 2024-2025.
- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty, staff, and students ordered 369 items to add to our collection this year. That is an 208% increase from 2024-2025.
- We registered a total of 3423 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 31,297, so each item in the collection circulated 0.11 times this year (all items in our library circulate).
The Quest for Information
- An average of 26 people visit our web site every day of the year. That's a total of 9,351 visits for the year, by 4107 unique individuals. That's a 3% increase in visits and a 36% increase in unique visitors from 2024-25.
- A project we collaborated on in 2025/26 was the creation of a list of Miami University Regionals courses with free or affordable textbooks. At the inspiration of our TRIO Support Services director, the Gardner-Harvey and Rentschler Libraries surveyed Regional faculty to gather course section information where free or affordable textbooks were used. 54 faculty members have contributed their information, covering 120 course sections (and 108 individual courses). The total savings for Regional students who registered for these courses has been calculated at $300,000.00 per semester. We hope many more faculty will adopt textbook alternatives and add their courses to our list.
- Gardner-Harvey Librarians also create and maintain (with our colleagues at the Rentschler Library in Hamilton and University Libraries in Oxford) subject and course guides called LibGuides for our databases and other information sources. You may find guides for each of the Regional degrees, plus guides for individual courses and specialized areas of research.
Helping You Find What You Need
- Every day we answer questions from students, faculty, and staff through multiple means of contact. You may see the various ways to reach us on our Contact Us page, including in-person, by chat, text, e-mail, or phone, or by setting up a Research Consultation.
- In face to face and synchronous Zoom sessions, we gave library instruction presentations in 6 classes this year, reaching 126 students (a decrease of 55% from 2024-2025).
- Our Embedded Librarian program reached students from 15 course sections in their Canvas course sites during the academic year (that is a 6% decrease from 2024-2025). We helped over 362 students with their information needs through the program.
A Place for Work, Study, and Remove from the World
- GHL was open 45 hours per week during 2025-26.
- We averaged 72 visitors per day, for a total of 17792 visits this year. This reflects a 2% decrease from 2024-2025. Our best attended day (tie) was September 23 and September 26, 2025, with 199 visitors. We had 159 days with 50 or more visitors (64% of our open days).
- The demand for GHL study rooms has remained strong, for individual study, Zoom participation, and small group meetings and study sessions, but checkouts did drop this year. Our ten study rooms were checked out 1867 times this year by students, faculty, and staff members. That represents a 27% increase from 2024-25. It was also the second highest number of annual checkouts of our rooms since FY19.
- We hosted 51 events in FY26, a mixture of in-person, Zoom-only, and in-person/Zoom simultaneous events. These included:
Eleven MUM Book Discussion Group meetings.
Two Short Story Club meetings.
A talk by Leanna Hieber on her book "America's Most Gothic: Haunted History Stranger than Fiction."
Five workshops by GHL librarians on using AI.
A presentation by Dr. Natalie Hofmeister on "Making Sense of Murmurations."
A presentation by Regional student Aidan Oglesbee on "Fungi and Mushroom Foraging."
Four TEC Lab workshops and four pop-up making workshops.
Six National Parks geology/archaeology presentations by Dr. Tammie Gerke.
Seven Underground Academy presentations by Janelle Allen.
Seven "Camper's Choice" sessions for the STEAM Studio program in July 2025 and June 2026.
Total attendance for the events was 570 participants, for an average of 11 people per event.
Helping to share ideas and spread the word
People may not know that we offer poster printing services for departments and individuals at the Regionals. You may use our form to request a poster print job for a final product that can be as large as 42" in one dimension and almost any size in the other dimension (since we print from a roll of paper). We print a number of academic posters for conferences and capstone projects, and also many marketing materials (a 24" x 36" poster is our most common requested item). We have two printers, and offer printing in both a standard coated poster paper and a photo quality paper. You are able to pick up your poster at our library, or we can send it to Hamilton or Oxford in campus mail.
What don't we know about how the library is used?
- One key part missing from these figures is off-campus use of library resources: all off-campus use is tallied as MU-wide use, so we do not know how many Middletown patrons are using databases from home (we estimate a lot of you are).
- We don't have campus-specific stats for all database searches - we're missing uses of the EBSCO databases, and other databases that are tracked on a whole-university level.
- We hope you'll continue to let us know what you think about the library, what you need from us, and what materials we should order for the collection.
A big development for GHL at the end of FY26 was a change in our reporting structure. We and the Rentschler Library in Hamilton have reported to the Regional campuses administration since our founding. But now we have joined University Libraries in Oxford under the leadership of Dean and University Librarian Jerome Conley. We look forward to even closer collaboration and connections with our new colleagues in the years ahead, and continued excellent service to our Regional students, faculty, staff, and community members.
Thanks to everyone for making the library and its resources a vital part of your academic lives! We really appreciate the opportunity to meet your needs in the library and remotely during this year, and we look forward to even more interactions in 2026/27.
The Gardner-Harvey Library Staff
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