Was this a year of the new normal? It was at least a year when the COVID pandemic did not close the library at any point. At the start of July, the entire library staff returned to on-site staffing. We returned to closer-to-normal operating hours for Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, staying open until 7:00pm from Monday to Thursday and being open a full day on Fridays (8am to 5pm). With a preponderance of Middletown classes still being online for Fall and Spring (roughly 65%) we did see fewer students and faculty on campus and therefore using the library.
It was certainly the year that we finally built a work table from some old wooden shelving ends (shown in the image above). That now stands in the TEC Lab and contains our laser cutter computer, some supplies for the laser cutter, and two 3D printers (oh, and also our circulating collection of makerspace-related books). We've talked about it for several years, and in Winter Term 2022, this long term project was finally completed!
These statistics reflect what happened between July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022. 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:- visits the library 8 times per year
- accesses the library web site 5 times per year.
- participates in a library instruction session or an embedded librarian course once every two years (if she is a student).
Now on to the detailed analysis!
Both a Borrower and a Lender Be
- GHL patrons checked out 1275 books and DVDs from us (766 from our local collection, 196 ordered from other MU libraries, and 313 items ordered from OhioLINK - that means that 40% of the items used by campus patrons came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 50% increase in total borrowing over 2020-2021.
- The GHL collection registered 2484 checkouts (that's the 766 items checked out by Middletown patrons above, plus 1,308 items sent to OhioLINK users, and 406 sent to other MU libraries - that means that 69% of the uses of our materials came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 3% decrease in total lending over 2020-2021.
- GHL patrons checked out 1015 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed course reserves, textbooks on reserve, study rooms, laptops, iPads, and other equipment). That is a 54% increase from 2020-2021. Textbooks on reserve checkouts totaled 53 in 2021-22, an increase of 61% from 2020-21.
- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty, staff, and students ordered 2001 items to add to our collection this year. That is a 32% increase from 2020-2021.
- We registered a total of 3,499 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 32,036, so each item in the collection circulated 0.10 times this year (all items in our library circulate).
The Quest for Information
- 31 people visit our web site every day. That's a total of 11,302 visits for the year, by 5,727 unique individuals. That's a 22% decrease in visits and a 45% increase in unique visitors from 2020-21.
- Gardner-Harvey Librarians also create and maintain subject and course guides called LibGuides for our databases and other information sources. In 2021-22, we were responsible for 69 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 28,938 visits during the year, for an average of 419 visits per guide.
Helping You Find What You Need
- In synchronous Zoom, Meet, and WebEx sessions, we gave library instruction presentations in 9 classes this year, reaching 208 students (a decrease of 5% from 2020-2021).
- Our Embedded Librarian program reached students from 29 course sections in their Canvas course sites during the academic year (that is a 12% increase from 2020-2021). We helped over 682 students with their information needs through the program.
A Place for Work, Study, and Remove from the World
- GHL will be open 53 hours per week for Fall 2022, and we maintained those hours during he regular semesters for all of 2021-22 (reducing hours for the summers and winter break).
- We averaged 66 visitors per day, for a total of 16,229 visits this year. This reflects an 87% increase from 2020-2021. Our best attended day was May 10, 2022, with 196 visitors. We had 162 days with 50 or more visitors (66% of our open days)
- With increased needs for participating in Zoom sessions, and lessening of restrictions for people to meet in small groups, we had nine study rooms checked out 746 times this year by students, faculty, and staff members. That represents a 92% increase from 2020-21.
- We were fully back to hosting in-person events, but several were held simultaneously in Zoom (a mode we will likely continue into the future). We had a total of 32 events: 12 MUM Book Discussion Group meetings, six TEC Lab workshops, five National Parks geology presentations by Dr. Tammie Gerke, "My Strange and Spooky World" with author James Willis, our Human Library event, three Regional Libraries diversity book discussions, and four "Camper's Choice" sessions for the STEAM Studio program in June 2022. Total attendance for the events was 392, for an average of 12 people per event.
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.
The Gardner-Harvey Library Staff
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