Here are the full annual statistics from fiscal year 2024 (the 2023/24 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.
Much like last academic year, we were open during the semesters from 8am to 7pm from Monday to Thursday and open on Fridays from 8am to 5pm. A preponderance of Middletown classes were, once again, held online for Fall and Spring (roughly 66% for the entire academic year), so we did still see a smaller number of students and faculty on campus and therefore in the library. But attendance at our events increased, as did some other measurable uses of the library.
The library roof replacement was completed in the first half of FY24, much to the joy of patrons and staff alike! We spent a very dry winter and spring, with no buckets or garbage cans full of water to empty. The library also had a beautiful interior paint job, with new accent colors all around. The image above is of our newly painted and arranged TEC SPACE on our lower level.
These statistics reflect what happened between July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024. 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 1200 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 16 times per year
- accesses the library web site eight 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 970 books and DVDs from us (745 from our local collection, 149 ordered from other MU libraries, and 76 items ordered from OhioLINK - that means that 23% of the items used by campus patrons came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 15% decrease in GHL patron borrowing over 2022-2023.
- The GHL collection registered 3249 checkouts (that's the 745 items checked out by Middletown patrons above, plus 1898 items sent to OhioLINK users, and 606 sent to other MU libraries - that means that 77% of the uses of our materials came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 10% decrease in total lending over 2022-2023.
- GHL patrons checked out 2488 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed course reserves, textbooks on reserve, study rooms, laptops, and other equipment). That is a 66% increase from 2022-2023. Textbooks on reserve checkouts totaled 52 in 2023-24, an increase of 27% from 2022-23.
- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty, staff, and students ordered 1073 items to add to our collection this year. That is a 64% decrease from 2022-2023.
- We registered a total of 5737 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 32,754, so each item in the collection circulated 0.18 times this year (all items in our library circulate).
The Quest for Information
- 26 people visit our web site every day. That's a total of 9,614 visits for the year, by 3,145 unique individuals. That's a 9% decrease in visits and a 3% decrease in unique visitors from 2022-23.
- Gardner-Harvey Librarians also create and maintain (with our colleagues at the Rentschler Library in Hamilton and University Libraries in Oxford) subject and course guides called LibGuides for our databases and other information sources. You may find guides for each of the Regional degrees, plus guides for individual courses and specialized areas of research.
Helping You Find What You Need
- Every day we answer questions from students, faculty, and staff through multiple means of contact. You may see the various ways to reach us on our Contact Us page, including in-person, by chat, text, e-mail, or phone, or by setting up a Research Consultation.
- In face to face and synchronous Zoom sessions, we gave library instruction presentations in 9 classes this year, reaching 147 students (a decrease of 133% from 2022-2023).
- Our Embedded Librarian program reached students from 21 course sections in their Canvas course sites during the academic year (that is a 10% decrease from 2022-2023). We helped over 411 students with their information needs through the program.
A Place for Work, Study, and Remove from the World
- GHL was open 53 hours per week during the regular semesters in 2022-2023 (reducing hours for the summer and winter and spring breaks).
- We averaged 104 visitors per day, for a total of 19497 visits this year. This is based on our new door counter system, which did not begin counting until the first day of classes in the Fall 2023 semester (August 28). The statistics run from then through June 30, 2024. Just looking at total visits (and knowing that FY23 had gate counter issues at the end of the fiscal year), this reflects a 9% increase from 2022-2023. Our best attended day was April 22, 2024, with 223 visitors. We had 176 days with 50 or more visitors (84% of our open days).
- In FY23, we converted one of our study rooms into the GHL Lounge, a spot for students to relax, play with our Nintendo Switch and Oculus VR headset, get free coffee and snacks, and use our microwave and refrigerator. The room was heavily used in FY24, and students benefited from not only the items listed above but also our Care Cabinet, which supplies personal hygiene products to students (many of which were donated by Regional faculty and staff). Jennifer Hicks and Jessie Long also sought and were awarded a Miami University Libraries Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Grant in late 2023 to provide hygiene supplies and snacks, which bolstered our efforts.
- The demand for study rooms has continued to surge, both for individual study and Zoom participation and also small group meetings and study sessions. Our nine study rooms were checked out 2010 times this year by students, faculty, and staff members. That represents a 69% increase from 2022-23.
- We hosted 59 events in FY24, a mixture of in-person and in-person/Zoom simultaneously. These included:
- Eleven MUM Book Discussion Group meetings.
- Six Diversity Book discussions (co-sponsored with the Rentschler Library and the Regional Centers for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).
- Eight TEC Lab workshops and four pop-up making workshops.
- Six National Parks geology/archaeology presentations by Dr. Tammie Gerke.
- Four Inside Biology talks by Dr. Al Cady.
- Four Underground Academy presentations by Regional faculty members.
- "Weird OH Road Trips" with author James Willis.
- Five "Camper's Choice" sessions for the STEAM Studio program in July 2023 and June 2024.
Total attendance for the events was 766 participants, for an average of 13 people per event.
Helping to share ideas and spread the word
People may not know that we offer poster printing services for departments and individuals at the Regionals. You may use our form to request a poster print job for a final product that can be as large as 42" in one dimension and almost any size in the other dimension (since we print from a roll of paper). We print a number of academic posters for conferences and capstone projects, and also many marketing materials (a 24" x 36" poster is our most common requested item). We have two printers, and offer printing in both a standard coated poster paper and a photo quality paper. To give you a sense of how much we print, we recently worked with Technology Services (our partner in poster printing) for a one year analysis of posters. From April 1, 2023 to April 1, 2024, we printed 875 coated posters (4203.53 square feet of posters) and 64 photo quality posters (519.67 square feet). You are able to pick up your poster at our library, or we can send it to Hamilton in campus mail.
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. We should note that we are experiencing a 42% budget cut for FY25, and books will only be added to the collection on a case by case basis. Streaming video licenses will also not be able to be purchased in FY25.
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 year, and we look forward to even more interactions in 2024/25.
The Gardner-Harvey Library Staff
