With the fiscal year just ending, here are the full annual stats for several of the Gardner-Harvey Library's (GHL) services. I hope you will find them useful to see how people use the library. How do you compare to the average GHL user?
These stats reflect what's happened this year, between July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012. Some stats we keep locally, others we pull from university-wide or OhioLINK-wide systems, and some are provided by database vendors.
Both a Borrower and a Lender Be
- GHL patrons checked out 4,417 books, DVDs, and videos from us (2,119 from our local collection, 1,602 ordered from other MU libraries, and 696 items ordered from OhioLINK - that means that more than half of the items used by campus patrons came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 19% decrease from 2010-2011. We also received 57 articles, books, and audiovisual items from libraries worldwide.
- The GHL collection registered 5,362 checkouts (that's the 2,119 items checked out by Middletown patrons above, plus 1787 items sent to OhioLINK users, and 1,456 sent to other MU libraries - that means that more than 60% of the uses of our materials came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 10% decrease from 2010-2011. We also sent 264 articles, books, and audiovisual items to libraries worldwide.
- GHL patrons checked out 3,423 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed
course reserves,
textbooks on reserve, laptops, iPads,
Wii games, and other equipment). That is an 18% decrease from 2010-2011.
- In addition to the printed or physical materials above, Middletown patrons have downloaded 9,047 e-books from the
OhioLINK E-Book Center. That is a 10% decrease from 2010-2011.
- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty and staff ordered 1,060 items to add to our collection this year. That is a 19% decrease from 2010-2011.
- We registered a total of 8,785 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 28,980, so each item in the collection circulated 0.33 times this year.
The Quest for Information
- Middletown patrons have performed 57,320 searches in databases provided to us by Ebsco. That is an 11.4% increase from 2010-2011.
- Middletown patrons downloaded 6,993 full-text articles from the
Electronic Journal Center. That is a 77.3% decrease over 2010-2011. That is an odd turn, and not one that we've been able to diagnose with OhioLINK staff as yet. This is in addition to full-text articles found right within Ebsco or other databases.
- As part of getting to these databases, 50 people visit our web site every day. That's a total of 18,411 visits for the year, by 5,832 unique individuals. Visits and visitors are down about 1% from 2010-2011.
A Place for Work, Study, and Remove from the World
- GHL is open 65
hours per week.
- We regularly schedule the library learning lab (GRD 111) for occasional class sessions. We also had 14 classes meet there weekly during fall semester and 10 met there during this spring. With some breaks in the early parts of the fall and spring semesters, we have been scheduling COMPASS placement testing sessions in the lab on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays for incoming Middletown students since March 2009.
- Our two
STAR Lounges have been checked out 290 times this year. STAR Lounge 2 was also used for several weeks in the last half of the semester by two courses for their class meetings in both the fall and spring semesters.
Helping You Find What You Need
- Inside and outside of the library, we gave library instruction presentations in 92 classes this year, reaching 1825 students (an increase of 12% over 2010-2011). The courses represented were from 18 different departments.
- Our
Embedded Librarian program reached students in 62 course sections during the academic year (that is a 3% increase over 2010-2011). We reached over 1660 students through the program and helped them with their information needs. A big development this year was making the switch from Blackboard to our new LMS, Niihka.
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 don't have stats for all database searches - we're missing uses of Lexis-Nexis and other databases.
- We lost the use of our gate counter in early Spring, and lost the stats we had gathered for the year. That left us without a sense of how many visitors we had this year.
- 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.
On Average
Taking these numbers and guesstimating a total Middletown community of 2500 students, faculty and staff members (and including community patrons), here's what can be said about the average person on campus. She:
- checks three items out from the library in a year (reserves and local/MU/OhioLINK collection items)
- performs 23 database searches per year.
- accesses the library web site seven times per year.
- views three e-books each year.
- participates in a library instruction session just less than once per year (if she is a student).
Thanks to everyone for making the library and its resources a vital part of your academic lives!
