Open house at the TEC Lab!

Stop by on Wednesday, September 6th and check out all the awesome things the TEC Lab has to offer.

During staffed hours you can learn about our laser engraver/cutter, watch the 3D printers in action, try your hand at 3Doodlers, make a button or magnet, or test out a number of other tools available to students, staff, faculty, and community patrons.

Staffed hours will be 11am-1pm and 6pm-8pm.

Remember, if you attend two or more of our library events in Fall 2017, you will be entered in a drawing for a Kindle Fire tablet.

See what's happening at Gardner-Harvey Library in our Fall Newsletter

Curious what Gardner-Harvey Library was up to this summer and what we have planned for fall? Check out our Fall Newsletter for an introduction to our new Middletown campus online archive, information about OER resources, a list of our upcoming events, and more. 


Here's a sneak peak at our new charging station!

The library welcomes you this fall with free beverages all week!

We welcome you to the Gardner-Harvey Library and the Middletown Campus this fall!

Come see our study rooms, our TEC Lab, and our computer and open seating spaces and enjoy a cup of coffee, tea, hot cocoa, or lemonade during the first week of classes.  We'll have beverages available from Monday, August 28 to Friday, September 1.

We hope we can help you have a great Fall Semester!

The image above was provided through a Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0 license by Fronx.

#MoveInMiami - Help students by funding our textbook collection

#MoveInMiami -- a one-day fundraiser for Miami University -- is tomorrow, Thursday, August 24! 

This year the Gardner-Harvey Library hopes to increase the number of textbooks we purchase and allow students to borrow (saving them the expense of textbooks or making it easier for them to catch up on reading and assignments while on campus). This is an exciting opportunity for us to raise gift funds to support this service and our other programming.  Can we count on you?

If you are able to make even a small gift to the Gardner-Harvey Library (or our sister library in Hamilton), please use the form at http://www.givetomiamioh.org/regionallibraries. All gifts are tax deductible, and you will be emailed a receipt upon making a gift online. Gifts must be made on August 24 to qualify for this initiative.

Thank you very much for your time and your support of the library and our students!

John

John J. Burke, MSLS
Library Director & Principal Librarian 
Gardner-Harvey Library
Miami University Middletown

burkejj@miamioh.edu
513-727-3293
http://miamioh.edu/burkejj

Text your questions to 513-273-5360


Have you noticed another staff member going above and beyond?
Nominate them and the Miami University Regionals Staff Forum will recognize them at our next meeting!

Middletown book discussion title for September!

The MUM Book Discussion group will next meet on Tuesday, September 26 to discuss Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife.  We will meet at 12 pm in Room 124 in the Library. 

Here is a brief summary of the title, along with links to request the book from Miami, OhioLINK, and SearchOhio libraries (Just click "Request" and choose "Miami University" from the dropdown list.  Then enter your UniqueID and password, and the library from which you would like to retrieve the item):  

"On what might become one of the most significant days in her husband's presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led her to the White House--and the repercussions of a life lived, as she puts it, "almost in opposition to itself." How can she both love and fundamentally disagree with her husband? How complicit has she been in the trajectory of her own life? What should she do when her private beliefs run against her public persona?"

Miami, OhioLINK, and  SearchOhio 

Read the book (or read something else interesting), then come along to our discussion to share what else you've been reading/watching/listening to/experiencing, and help us plan our future readings.  

Have an idea for a book to discuss?  Let us know and check out our page of past and future reads at http://www.mid.miamioh.edu/library/bookdiscussion.htm

How was the Gardner-Harvey Library used in 2016/17?

Here are the full annual stats from fiscal year 2017 (the 2016/17 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, 2016 to June 30, 2017. Some stats we keep locally, others we pull from university-wide or OhioLINK-wide systems, and some are provided by database vendors.

Highlights for this year include:

• A 17% increase in the use of GHL's books and DVDs.
• A 57% increase in the use of reserve materials.
• A 58% increase in the number of items added to the collection.
• A 16% increase in visits to the library.
• A 688% increase in study room use.

Read on for full details on these and other activities.

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 nearly three items out from the library in a year (reserves and local/MU/OhioLINK collection items)
- visits the library 30 times per year
- downloads four full-text articles each year.
- accesses the library web site eight 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 2,133 books and DVDs from us (1,011 from our local collection, 629 ordered from other MU libraries, and 493 items ordered from OhioLINK - that means that more than 52% of the items used by campus patrons came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 16% decrease in total borrowing from 2015-2016.  

- The GHL collection registered 3,634 checkouts (that's the 1,011 items checked out by Middletown patrons above, plus 1,737 items sent to OhioLINK users, and 886 sent to other MU libraries - that means that 72% of the uses of our materials came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 17% increase in total lending over 2015-2016. 

- GHL patrons checked out 3,648 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed course reserves, textbooks on reserve, study rooms, laptops, iPads, and other equipment). That is a 57% increase from 2015-2016. Textbooks on reserve checkouts totaled 515 in 2016/17, a decrease of nearly 25% from 2015-16.

- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty, staff, and students ordered 1886 items to add to our collection this year. That is a 58% increase from 2015-2016.  

- We registered a total of 7,282 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 30,520, so each item in the collection circulated 0.24 times this year (all items in our library circulate). 

The Quest for Information
- Middletown patrons spent 13,424 search sessions downloading 8,192 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 7% decrease in search sessions and a 27% decrease in downloads from 2015-2016).

- On their way to these databases, 44 people visit our web site every day. That's a total of 15,923 visits for the year, by 7,491 unique individuals. That's a 15% decrease in visits and a 10% decrease in unique visitors from 2015-2016.

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

- We averaged 239 visitors per day, for a total of 61,034 visits this year.  This reflects a 16% increase from 2015-2016.  With our renovation concluding in August 2016, students and other patrons really flocked to the new library and made heavy use of the space (as the statistics below also support). Having the collection moved, the new elevator, the GRD 111 renovation, and the carpet replacement completed by the end of January 2017 provided even more improved spaces for spring semester 2017.

- We regularly schedule the library learning lab (GRD 111) for single class sessions. We also had one class meet there weekly during fall semester.  We also made use of our Study Room 110  with three classes meeting weekly in there during the fall semester and 5 classes meeting weekly during the spring semester.

- Our ten study rooms were checked out 1,907 times this year by students, faculty, and staff members. That represents a 688% increase from 2015-16 (partly due to increasing from two rooms to ten).  The average uses per room also rose from 56 in 2015-16 to 190 in 2016-17, which shows a tremendous response to the rooms.

- We held several events in the library this year that we sponsored or co-sponsored.  Aside from the monthly MUM Book Discussion Group meetings (for which we do not have attendance recorded), we had 15 events (12 TEC Lab workshops and three other events (two national parks geology video/lectures and one Casper Lecture book discussion)).  Total attendance was 120, for an average of 8 people per event.  A total of 99 different individuals came to at least one program, with 14 of those people attending two or three events.

Helping You Find What You Need
- Inside and outside of the library, we gave library instruction presentations in 36 classes this year, reaching 717 students (a decrease of 20% from 2015-2016). 

- Our Embedded Librarian program reached students from 68 course sections in their Canvas course sites during the academic year (that is a 6% decrease from 2015-2016). We helped over 1,332 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 Nexis Uni 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.

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