The MUM Book Discussion group will next meet on Friday, September 26. Our title is This is Happiness by Niall Williams. Here is a brief summary:
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Here are the full annual statistics from fiscal year 2025 (the 2024/25 academic year) for several of the Gardner-Harvey Library's (GHL) services. We hope you will find them useful to see how people use the library.
We experienced a staff shortage late in the fall of the academic year, in addition to our ongoing budget reduction. That forced us to change our semester hours from 8am to 7pm from Monday to Thursday and open on Fridays from 8am to 5pm in the fall to remain open from 8am to 5pm Monday through Friday year round (semesters and breaks) starting in January. We did decrease the percentage of face to face courses at Middletown even further in FY25 (to 32% for the year), and that meant we saw a smaller number of students and faculty on campus and therefore in the library.
These statistics reflect what happened between July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025. 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 1000 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 18 times per year
- accesses the library web site nine 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 873 books and DVDs from us (738 from our local collection, 42 ordered from other MU libraries, and 93 items ordered from OhioLINK - that means that 16% of the items used by campus patrons came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 10% decrease in GHL patron borrowing over 2023-2024.
- The GHL collection registered 2085 checkouts (that's the 738 items checked out by Middletown patrons above, plus 1036 items sent to OhioLINK users, and 311 sent to other MU libraries - that means that 65% of the uses of our materials came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 36% decrease in total lending over 2023-2024. We should note that during our move to install our new Miami University Libraries Search from Ex Libris, OhioLINK borrowing was suspended right after finals week in Spring 2025, and did not pick up again until the new fiscal year.
- GHL patrons checked out 2016 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed course reserves, textbooks on reserve, study rooms, laptops, and other equipment). That is a 19% decrease from 2023-2024.
- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty, staff, and students ordered 120 items to add to our collection this year. That is an 89% decrease from 2023-2024. Since our FY25 42% operating budget cut has become permanent going forward, we will be able to buy fewer books than we have historically, but we hope to add a larger number in FY26 than we did in FY25.
- We registered a total of 4101 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 31,150, so each item in the collection circulated 0.13 times this year (all items in our library circulate).
The Quest for Information
- An average of 25 people visit our web site every day of the year. That's a total of 9,065 visits for the year, by 3,022 unique individuals. That's a 6% decrease in visits and a 4% decrease in unique visitors from 2023-24.
- 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 15 classes this year, reaching 278 students (an increase of 36% from 2023-2024).
- Our Embedded Librarian program reached students from 16 course sections in their Canvas course sites during the academic year (that is a 24% decrease from 2023-2024). We helped over 461 students with their information needs through the program.
A Place for Work, Study, and Remove from the World
- GHL was open 45 hours per week during the majority of 2024-25 (we were open 53 hours per week during the Fall 2024 semester).
- We averaged 74 visitors per day, for a total of 18220 visits this year. This reflects a 7% decrease from 2023-2024. Our best attended day was August 26, 2024, with 230 visitors. We had 174 days with 50 or more visitors (70% of our open days).
- The demand for GHL study rooms has remained strong, for individual study, Zoom participation, and small group meetings and study sessions, but checkouts did drop this year. Our ten study rooms were checked out 1473 times this year by students, faculty, and staff members. That represents a 27% decrease from 2023-24. It was still the second highest number of annual checkouts of our rooms since FY19.
- We hosted 46 events in FY25, a mixture of in-person and in-person/Zoom simultaneous events. These included:
Ten MUM Book Discussion Group meetings.
Two Diversity Book discussions (co-sponsored with the Rentschler Library and the Regional Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).
Seven TEC Lab workshops and three pop-up making workshops.
Six National Parks geology/archaeology presentations by Dr. Tammie Gerke.
Four Know Your Body talks by Dr. Al Cady.
Seven Underground Academy presentations by Janelle Allen.
Five "Camper's Choice" sessions for the STEAM Studio program in July 2024 and June 2025.
Total attendance for the events was 548 participants, for an average of 12 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. 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.
Two huge developments for GHL in 2025 were the hiring of Jennifer Hicks, long-time staff member, as our new Outreach & Instruction Librarian, and Leah Tabler as our new Circulation Supervisor for both the Rentschler and Gardner-Harvey Libraries. Congratulations and welcome to you both!
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 2025/26.
The Gardner-Harvey Library Staff
The Gardner-Harvey Library is happy to announce that we have a new way for you to search for books, articles, e-books, and many other types of information: Miami University Libraries Search! This one-stop search blank will give you access to the digital and physical collections of Miami University and our OhioLINK partner libraries across the state.
OhioLINK libraries have reached an extraordinary milestone with the successful upgrade of shared system software to support teaching, learning, and research for Ohio higher education. The on-time and on-budget project was the culmination of more than two years of planning and collaboration, encompassing the migration of more than a million titles.
The entire OhioLINK consortium, composed of 115 libraries at 86 four-year and two-year institutions of higher education across Ohio, is now fully operational on the state-of-the-art Ex Libris Alma/Primo VE system. The new system’s user-friendly features include:
We have a new back-end system to make our work easier, adding books and e-resources into the system and shipping items around the state. But you only need to worry about the front-end: the unified search box (shown above, and available from our website) to get to the information you need for research, coursework, and recreational pursuits.
Gardner-Harvey Library staff are working on new tutorials and guidance to help you make the most of this tool. Please give it a try, and if you have questions, do not hesitate to contact us.
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The MUM Book Discussion group will next meet on Friday, June 27. Our title is By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult. Here is a brief summary:
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