Here are the full annual stats from fiscal year 2018 (the 2017/18 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, 2017 to June 30, 2018. 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 25% increase in the use of GHL's books and DVDs.
- A 29% increase in the use of reserve materials.
- An 11% increase in the number of items added to the collection.
- A 50% increase in study room use.
- Many new events held in the library.
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 four items out from the library in a year (reserves and local/MU/OhioLINK collection items)
- visits the library 26 times per year
- accesses the library web site 14 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!
- GHL patrons checked out 2,653 books and DVDs from us (1,699 from our local collection, 559 ordered from other MU libraries, and 395 items ordered from OhioLINK - that means that 36% of the items used by campus patrons came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 24% increase in total borrowing over 2016-2017.
- The GHL collection registered 4,530 checkouts (that's the 1,699 items checked out by Middletown patrons above, plus 1,860 items sent to OhioLINK users, and 954 sent to other MU libraries - that means that 62% of the uses of our materials came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 25% increase in total lending over 2016-2017.
- GHL patrons checked out 4,695 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed course reserves, textbooks on reserve, study rooms, laptops, iPads, and other equipment). That is a 29% increase from 2016-2017. Textbooks on reserve checkouts totaled 597 in 2017-18, an increase of 16% from 2016-17.
- In addition to those physical reserve items, we also place MU libraries-owned DVDs and VHS tapes on a digital reserve service called Video on Demand. We had 234 videos on there for classes to use in 2017-18, and they were viewed a total of 5,815 times. That is an increase of 90% in views over 2016-2017.
- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty, staff, and students ordered 2102 items to add to our collection this year. That is a 11% increase from 2016-2017.
- We registered a total of 9,225 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 30,609, so each item in the collection circulated 0.30 times this year (all items in our library circulate).
The Quest for Information
- 78 people visit our web site every day. That's a total of 28,366 visits for the year, by 5,871 unique individuals. That's a 78% increase in visits and a 22% decrease in unique visitors from 2015-2016.
- Gardner-Harvey Librarians also create and maintain subject guides to our databases and other information sources called LibGuides. In 2017-18, we were responsible for 40 LibGuides, either individually or in cooperation with our colleagues at the Rentschler Library in Hamilton or University Libraries in Oxford. Those guides received a total of 7,737 visits during the year, for an average of 193 visits per guide.
Helping You Find What You Need
- Inside and outside of the library, we gave library instruction presentations in 32 classes this year, reaching 628 students (a decrease of 11% from 2016-2017).
- Our Embedded Librarian program reached students from 72 course sections in their Canvas course sites during the academic year (that is a 6% increase from 2016-2017). We helped over 1,576 students with their information needs through the program.
A Place for Work, Study, and Remove from the World
- GHL is open 57 hours per week.
- We averaged 209 visitors per day, for a total of 53,407 visits this year. This reflects a 13% decrease from 2016-2017. Our best attended day was May 10, 2018, with 508 visitors. We had 81 days with 300 or more visitors (32% of our open days)
- We regularly schedule the library learning lab (GRD 111) for single class sessions. We also schedule Study Room 110 for class sessions, with four classes meeting weekly in there during the fall semester and four classes meeting weekly during the spring semester during 2017-18.
- Our nine study rooms were checked out 2,859 times this year by students, faculty, and staff members. That represents a 50% increase from 2016-17. The average uses per room also rose from 190 in 2016-17 to 318 in 2017-18, 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 27 events (13 TEC Lab workshops, 6 National Parks geology video/lectures, and 8 offerings of the PZ7 Book Club)). Total attendance for Fall and Spring semesters was 140, for an average of 5 people per event. A total of 118 different individuals came to at least one program, with 12 of those people attending two or three events (and participating in two drawings for Kindle Fire tablets).
- We also hosted a Women's History Month talk in March 2018, a meeting of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in November 2017 that featured a talk by former Ohio First Lady Hope Taft, a speed mentoring event for Middletown High School in April 2018, and the CIT 458 senior poster presentation in May 2018. And there was a small wedding reception in GRD 110 in April 2018.
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 Nexis Uni, 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.
Thanks to everyone for making the library and its resources a vital part of your academic lives!
The Gardner-Harvey Library Staff
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