Wednesday, November 02, 2016

How was the library used in 2015/16?

Here are the full annual stats from fiscal year 2016 (the 2015-16 academic year) for several of the Gardner-Harvey Library's (GHL) services. I hope you will find them useful to see how people use the library. 

These statistics reflect what happened between July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016. Some stats we keep locally, others we pull from university-wide or OhioLINK-wide systems, and some are provided by database vendors.

On Average
Taking the statistics below and guesstimating a total Middletown community of 2000 students, faculty and staff members (and including community patrons), here's what can be said about the average person on campus. She:

- checks two items out from the library in a year (reserves and local/MU/OhioLINK collection items)
- visits the library 26 times per year
- downloads five full-text articles each year.
- accesses the library web site nine times per year.

- participates in a library instruction session or an embedded librarian course once per year (if she is a student).

Now on to the detailed analysis!

Both a Borrower and a Lender Be
- GHL patrons checked out 2,537 books and DVDs from us (1,089 from our local collection, 862 ordered from other MU libraries, and 586 items ordered from OhioLINK - that means that more than 55% of the items used by campus patrons came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 14% decrease in borrowing from 2014-2015.  

- The GHL collection registered 3,115 checkouts (that's the 1,089 items checked out by Middletown patrons above, plus 1206 items sent to OhioLINK users, and 820 sent to other MU libraries - that means that 65% of the uses of our materials came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 14% decrease in checkouts from 2014-2015. 

- GHL patrons checked out 2,324 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed course reservestextbooks on reserve, study rooms, laptops, iPads, and other equipment). That is a 2% decrease from 2014-2015. Textbooks on reserve checkouts more than doubled in 2015-16, with 685 checkouts vs. 325 in 2014-15.

- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty, staff, and students ordered 1194 items to add to our collection this year. That is a 20% increase from 2014-2015.  

- We registered a total of 5,439 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 30,529, so each item in the collection circulated 0.18 times this year (all items in our library circulate). 

The Quest for Information
- Middletown patrons spent 14,371 search sessions downloading 11,228  full-text articles from Ebsco databases provided to us through Miami University and OhioLINK.  This only represents use of the databases on campus.  Those numbers reflect a 46% increase in search sessions and a 10% decrease in downloads from 2014-2015).

- On their way to these databases, 51 people visit our web site every day. That's a total of 18,772 visits for the year, by 8,352 unique individuals. That's a 19% increase in visits and a 24% increase in unique visitors from 2014-2015.

A Place for Work, Study, and Remove from the World
- GHL is open 57 hours per week.

- We averaged 225 visitors per day, for a total of 52,631 visits this year.  This reflects a 14% decrease from 2014-2015.  This may be due in part to our renovation, which closed off much of the library following finals week in May 2016, and moving around our seating areas as we cleared out the book stacks area ahead of the renovation in Winter Term 2016.

- We regularly schedule the library learning lab (GRD 111) for single class sessions. We also had 3 classes meet there weekly during fall semester and 3 met there during the spring.  We also made use of our study rooms with 5 classes meeting weekly during the fall in STAR Lounge 2.

- Our two STAR Lounges have been checked out 113 times this year by students.  That represents an 18% decrease from 2014-15.  They were also used weekly by librarians and other faculty and staff members for meetings. 

Helping You Find What You Need
- Inside and outside of the library, we gave library instruction presentations in 45 classes this year, reaching 773 students (a decrease of 28% from 2014-2015). The courses represented were from 14 different departments.

- Our Embedded Librarian program reached students from 72 course sections in their Canvas course sites during the academic year (that is a 10% decrease from 2014-2015). We helped over 1,503 students with their information needs through the program.

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 have also lost meaningful data for on-campus use from some of our OhioLINK full-text resources.

- We don't have campus-specific stats for all database searches - we're missing uses of Lexis-Nexis and other databases.

- 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.

Thanks to everyone for making the library and its resources a vital part of your academic lives!

No comments: