Here are the full annual stats from fiscal year 2020 (the 2019/20 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.
This was, of course, quite a crazy year. With the advent of COVID-19, the library was closed along with the Middletown campus and the University in March 2020 (our last open day was March 16, which meant we lost 75 scheduled days in the building (30% of our total days for the year)). That did impact many of our library services, though we managed to continue our services alongside our Hamilton campus colleagues and in cooperation with our colleagues in Oxford. We are grateful for everyone's patience with us as we moved to work from home and serve your research needs in the midst of Spring Semester.
These statistics reflect what happened between July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020. 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 2000 students, faculty and staff members (and including community patrons), here's what can be said about the average person on campus. She:
- checks out nearly three items from the library each year (reserves and local/MU/OhioLINK collection items)
- visits the library 17 times per year
- accesses the library web site nearly 7 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 1,547 books and DVDs from us (695 from our local collection, 357 ordered from other MU libraries, and 495 items ordered from OhioLINK - that means that 55% of the items used by campus patrons came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 49% decrease in total borrowing over 2018-2019.
- The GHL collection registered 3,149 checkouts (that's the 695 items checked out by Middletown patrons above, plus 1,630 items sent to OhioLINK users, and 824 sent to other MU libraries - that means that 78% of the uses of our materials came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 29% decrease in total lending over 2018-2019.
- GHL patrons checked out 2,544 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed course reserves, textbooks on reserve, study rooms, laptops, iPads, and other equipment). That is a 26% decrease from 2018-2019. Textbooks on reserve checkouts totaled 458 in 2019-20, a decrease of 13% from 2018-19.
- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty, staff, and students ordered 1730 items to add to our collection this year. That is a 17% decrease from 2018-2019.
- We registered a total of 5,693 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 32,269, so each item in the collection circulated 0.18 times this year (all items in our library circulate).
The Quest for Information
- 56 people visit our web site every day. That's a total of 13,477 visits for the year, by 3,909 unique individuals. That's a 34% decrease in visits and an 27% decrease in unique visitors from 2018-2019.
- Gardner-Harvey Librarians also create and maintain subject guides to our databases and other information sources called LibGuides. In 2019-20, we were responsible for 85 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 15,798 visits during the year, for an average of 185 visits per guide.
Helping You Find What You Need
- Inside and outside of the library, we gave library instruction presentations in 39 classes this year, reaching 765 students (a decrease of 26% from 2018-2019).
- Our Embedded Librarian program reached students from 39 course sections in their Canvas course sites during the academic year (that is a 56% decrease from 2018-2019). We helped over 613 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 192 visitors per day, for a total of 34,442 visits this year. This reflects a 31% decrease from 2018-2019. Our best attended day was August 27, 2019, with 543 visitors. We had 26 days with 300 or more visitors (15% 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 two classes meeting weekly during the spring semester during 2019-20.
- Our ten study rooms were checked out 1,314 times this year by students, faculty, and staff members. That represents a 36% decrease from 2018-19. We opened a new four person study room in the Library SPACE area on our lower level during the year.
- We held several events in the library this year that we sponsored or co-sponsored. We had a total of 25 events: 11 MUM Book Discussion Group meetings (we went online via Google Meet for March-June), 5 TEC Lab workshops, 4 National Parks geology video/lectures by Dr. Tammie Gerke, our Ohio ghost story presentation with James Willis, a Game Night at the library (co-sponsored with Good Game Well Played), a presentation by Dr. Marianne Cotugno on The Awakening Land, our "Finals Fantasy" Saturday study day, and our inaugural Middletown Maker Faire. Total attendance for Fall and Spring semesters was 347, for an average of 14 people per event.
- We also hosted sessions for the inaugural STEAM Studio program in Summer 2019, meetings of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in October 2019 and March 2020, and poster presentations by students in GLG 141 and GLG 307 in December 2019.
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! We really appreciate the opportunity to meet your needs in the library and remotely during this very unusual year.
The Gardner-Harvey Library Staff
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