How was the Gardner-Harvey Library used in 2021/22?

Here are the full annual statistics from fiscal year 2022 (the 2021/22 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.

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:

- checks out one item from the library each year (reserves and local/MU/OhioLINK collection items)
- 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.

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 of the pandemic, and we look forward to even more improvements in 2022/23).

The Gardner-Harvey Library Staff

New books and more added to the Gardner-Harvey Library in June!

We add many new items to the collection each month, and we hope you'll check some out. Take a look at our New Books shelves or skim down our new materials list of items we added to the collection in June! 

By the way, we just moved our New Books display into a new area in the library (as shown above), to the far left of our Info Desk.  

We added 145 books, e-books, DVDs, and other items during that time, thanks to your selections and suggestions. The list can be sorted by call number, area of our collection, or by title. There is definitely something here for everyone!

Here are ten titles from the list, to give you an idea of what we've been buying: 

• Accessible vacations : an insider's guide to 10 national parks / Simon J. Hayhoe
• No escape : the true story of China's genocide of the Uyghurs / Nury Turkel
• In the houses of their dead : the Lincolns, the Booths, and the spirits / Terry Alford
• On the trail of the jackalope : how a legend captured the world's imagination and helped us cure cancer / Michael P. Branch
• Tree thieves : crime and survival in North America's woods / Lyndsie Bourgon
• Junk science and the American criminal justice system / M. Chris Fabricant
• Breaking ranks : how the rankings industry rules higher education and what to do about it / Colin Diver
• The essence of film noir : the style and themes of cinema's dark genre / Diana Royer
• Under the skin : the hidden toll of racism on American lives and the health of a nation / Linda Villarosa
• Elusive : how Peter Higgs solved the mystery of mass / Frank Close

This tag will show you all of the prior lists of new materials, in reverse chronological order. We are eager to hear from you about individual items you would like us to buy, or types of items we should be on the look out for, or general subject areas we should build up in the collection.

If you have a suggestion of something to order, please use our "Tell GHL to Buy It" form, email Alan Kelley (kelleya@miamioh.edu), or drop by the library with your request. And pass your general suggestions or comments about the collection to us in those same ways. 

This is the last update from our 2022 fiscal year, which is now concluded.  We added 2001 items to the collection, thanks to you!

July/August's Middletown Book for Discussion: Homegoing

 

The MUM Book Discussion group will next meet on Tuesday, August 2.  Our title is Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing.  Here is a brief summary:

"Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial and live in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, and her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle's women's dungeon, and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, where she will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the tribal wars of Ghana to slavery and Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the north to the Great Migration to the streets of 20th century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi's has written a modern masterpiece, a novel that moves through histories and geographies and--with outstanding economy and force--captures the troubled spirit of our own nation."  

Here is where you can find the book:

• There are several copies available through Miami, OhioLINK, and SearchOhio.  
  
• Amazon has the hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook available, and Bookshop.org has links to purchase the title from independent booksellers.

Our group is always finding interesting titles to share, and we look forward to the new things you'll bring to the table.  In addition to discussing Hamnet, the group also shared these titles for consideration at their June 28 meeting:

• Midnight's Children and the Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
• A Single Thread, Tracy Chevalier
• Winds of War, Herman Wouk
  
• The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, Isaac Butler
• Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the 20th Century, Dana Stevens
• The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso
• Deacon King Kong, James McBride
• Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

We will meet at 12 pm on the 2nd both in Room 123 in the Library and in Zoom at 

Join Zoom Meeting

Passcode: 308825

‬Add this event to your Google Calendar!  (which includes the Zoom information)

Please come along to our discussion to share what you've been reading/watching/listening to/experiencing!

If you're looking for something interesting to read, check out our page of past and future reads at http://www.mid.miamioh.edu/library/bookdiscussion.htm

"Fishermen by Cape Coast Castle" by Erik Cleves Kristensen is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

New books (and more) added to the Gardner-Harvey Library in May!

We add many new items to the collection each month, and we hope you'll check some out. Take a look at our New Books shelves or skim down our new materials list of items we added to the collection in May! We added 206 books, e-books, DVDs, and other items during that time, thanks to your selections and suggestions. The list can be sorted by call number, area of our collection, or by title. There is definitely something here for everyone!

Here are ten titles from the list, to give you an idea of what we've been buying: 

• The garden of broken things / Francesca Momplaisir
• The case of the married woman : Caroline Norton and her fight for women's justice / Antonia Fraser
• The accidental history of the U.S. immigration courts : war, fear, and the roots of dysfunction / Alison Peck
• To die for the people : the writings of Huey P. Newton / edited by Toni Morrison
• My body is not a prayer request : disability justice in the church / Amy Kenny
• 8 billion and counting : how sex, death, and migration shape our world / Jennifer D. Sciubba
• What's your zip code story? : understanding and overcoming class bias in the workplace / CJ Gross
• My old Kentucky home : the astonishing life and reckoning of an iconic American song / Emily Bingham
• Liarmouth : a feel-bad romance / John Waters
• Can fish count? : what animals reveal about our uniquely mathematical minds / Brian Butterworth

This tag will show you all of the prior lists of new materials, in reverse chronological order. We are eager to hear from you about individual items you would like us to buy, or types of items we should be on the look out for, or general subject areas we should build up in the collection.

If you have a suggestion of something to order, please use our "Tell GHL to Buy It" form, email Alan Kelley (kelleya@miamioh.edu), or drop by the library with your request. And pass your general suggestions or comments about the collection to us in those same ways. 

Thanks again for keeping our collection vibrant and your information needs met!

June's Middletown Book for Discussion: Eligible (June 28)

 

The MUM Book Discussion group will next meet on Tuesday, June 28.  Our title is Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible.  Here is a brief summary:

" A modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice...Returning with her sister, Jane, to their Ohio hometown (Cincinnati) when their father falls ill, New York magazine editor Lizzy Bennett confronts challenges in the form of her younger sisters' football fangirl antics, a creepy cousin's unwanted attentions and the infuriating standoffish manners of a handsome neurosurgeon."  

Here is where you can find the book:

• There are several copies available through Miami, OhioLINK, and SearchOhio.  
  
• Amazon has the hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook available, and Bookshop.org has links to purchase the title from independent booksellers.

Our group is always finding interesting titles to share, and we look forward to the new things you'll bring to the table.  In addition to discussing Hamnet, the group also shared these titles for consideration at their May 31 meeting:

• The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare, Arliss Ryan
• Shakespeare: the World As Stage, Bill Bryson
• Upstart Crow (BBC sitcom about Shakespeare)
  
• Grandma Gatewood's Walk: the Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail, Ben Montgomery
• How the Wild Effect Turned Me Into a Hiker at 69, Jane Congdon
• Once There Were Wolves, Charlotte McConaghy
• State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
• The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, Lars Mytting
• The Two Family House, Lyndia Cohen Loigman
• The Honey-Don't List, Christina Lauren
• What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, Mark Doty
• Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series
• The Wright Brothers, David McCullough
• A Million Reasons Why, Jessica Strawser
• The Henna Artist, Alka Joshi
• The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara

We will meet at 12 pm on the 28th both in Room 123 in the Library and in Zoom at 

Join Zoom Meeting

Passcode: 678264

‬

Add this event to your Google Calendar!  (which includes the Zoom information)

Please come along to our discussion to share what you've been reading/watching/listening to/experiencing!

If you're looking for something interesting to read, check out our page of past and future reads at http://www.mid.miamioh.edu/library/bookdiscussion.htm

"Filoli Garden" by jimgris is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Pop-up DIY Headshots this week at the Gardner-Harvey Library

 

Students, faculty, and staff are invited to stop by the Gardner-Harvey Library on the Middletown campus this Thursday and Friday, May 5th and 6th, for a do-it-yourself business portrait. Great for LinkedIn, e-mail, and other professional profiles. Come by between 9am to 7pm on Thursday, and 9am and 5pm on Friday!

New books (and more) added to the Gardner-Harvey Library in April!

We add many new items to the collection each month, and we hope you'll check some out. Take a look at our New Books shelves or skim down our new materials list of items we added to the collection in April! We added 231 books, e-books, DVDs, and other items during that time, thanks to your selections and suggestions. The list can be sorted by call number, area of our collection, or by title. There is definitely something here for everyone!

Here are ten titles from the list, to give you an idea of what we've been buying: 

• Otherlands : a journey through Earth's extinct worlds / Thomas Halliday
• The end of astronauts : why robots are the future of exploration / Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees
• At the end of the world, turn left / Zhanna Slor
• The candy house : a novel / Jennifer Egan
• Not exactly lying : fake news and fake journalism in American history / Andie Tucher
• Grey bees / Andrey Kurkov   translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk
• Africa's struggle for its art : history of a postcolonial defeat / Bénédicte Savoy   translated by Susanne Meyer-Abich"
• The intersection of high-impact practices : what's next for higher education? / Shauna Reilly and Samantha Langley-Turnbaugh
• Trigger points : inside the mission to stop mass shootings in America / Mark Follman
• A series of fortunate events : chance and the making of the planet, life, and you / Sean B. Carroll

This tag will show you all of the prior lists of new materials, in reverse chronological order. We are eager to hear from you about individual items you would like us to buy, or types of items we should be on the look out for, or general subject areas we should build up in the collection.

If you have a suggestion of something to order, please use our "Tell GHL to Buy It" form, email Alan Kelley (kelleya@miamioh.edu), or drop by the library with your request. And pass your general suggestions or comments about the collection to us in those same ways. 

Thanks again for keeping our collection vibrant and your information needs met!

OhioLINK and SearchOhio requesting is back!

 

The ability to request items and have them delivered to you from other Ohio academic and public libraries is back!  

We have our new delivery service vendor in place, and the OhioLINK and SearchOhio catalogs (linked directly from our website or inside the Miami University Books & More catalog) have their Request buttons activated again.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the GHL staff.  If you are not sure how to request an item, please use this two-minute tutorial to bring you up to speed.

Free coffee, tea, hot chocolate, and snacks at the Gardner-Harvey Library! (May 2-May 13)

 

The Library will offer free coffee, tea, hot chocolate, and snacks during the week before finals and the week of finals, starting on Monday, May 2nd and lasting through Friday, May 13th. 

Stop by the new Library Lounge (we're holding a naming contest!) in Room 110 from 8:00am to 7:00pm, Monday through Thursday, and from 8:00am to 5:00pm on Friday. Please drop on by and enjoy a cup!

It's our way of making your end of semester studying and paper/project preparation a bit more relaxing. If we can help with any research, let us know.

We wish you well on your finals!  You got this!

Thanks for being a part of our library community!

The image above was provided through a Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0 license by fronx.

May's Middletown Book for Discussion: Hamnet (May 31)

 

The MUM Book Discussion group will next meet on Tuesday, May 31.  Our title is Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet: a Novel of the Plague.  Here is a brief summary of this imagined backstory of a well known dramatist:

"A thrilling departure: a short, piercing, deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare's 11 year old son Hamnet--a name interchangeable with Hamlet in 15th century Britain--and the years leading up to the production of his great play. England, 1580. A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest masterpieces of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent departure from one of our most gifted novelists."  

Here is where you can find the book:

• There are several copies available through Miami, OhioLINK, and SearchOhio.  I am happy to note that our statewide delivery service should start accepting requests on May 2.
  
• Amazon has the hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook available, and Bookshop.org has links to purchase the title from independent booksellers.

Our group is always finding interesting titles to share, and we look forward to the new things you'll bring to the table.  In addition to discussing Their Eyes Were Watching God, the group also shared these titles for consideration at their April 26 meeting:

• Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney
• Breathe, Joyce Carol Oates
• Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell
• Upstart Crow (sitcom about Shakespeare)
• The Dead Fathers Club, Matt Haig
• The Venice Sketchbook, Rhys Bowen
• Where You Once Belonged, Kent Haruf
• Maus, Art Speigelman
• Elm Creek Quilts series, Jennifer Chiaverini
• The Women's March, Jennifer Chiaverini
• Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a  Legendary Car Beat Hitler's Best, Neal Bascomb
• Every Fifteen Minutes, Lisa Scottoline
• Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach
• Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami

We will meet at 12 pm on the 31st both in Room 123 in the Library and in Zoom at 

Join Zoom Meeting

Passcode: 171616

‬

Add this event to your Google Calendar!  (which includes the Zoom information)

Please come along to our discussion to share what you've been reading/watching/listening to/experiencing!

If you're looking for something interesting to read, check out our page of past and future reads at http://www.mid.miamioh.edu/library/bookdiscussion.htm

"Shakespeare's birth place. Stratford upon Avon" by elvis_payne is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

April's Middletown Book for Discussion: Their Eyes Were Watching God (Apr. 26)

 

The MUM Book Discussion group will next meet on Tuesday, April 26.  Our title is Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Here is a brief summary of this tale of a thrice-married woman in Florida:

"This luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in Black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates boldly and brilliantly African-American culture and heritage. And in a powerful, mesmerizing narrative, it pays quiet tribute to a Black woman who, though constricted by the times, still demanded to be heard."  

Here is where you can find the book:

• There are several copies available through Miami, OhioLINK, and SearchOhio.  However, our statewide delivery service is interrupted during the month of April, so only in-person travel to OhioLINK or SearchOhio libraries would be a possibility to find the book at those locations.
  
• Amazon has the hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook available, and Bookshop.org has links to purchase the title from independent booksellers.

Our group is always finding interesting titles to share, and we look forward to the new things you'll bring to the table.  

We will meet at 12 pm on the 26th both in Room 123 in the Library and in Zoom at 

Join Zoom Meeting

Passcode: 473137

‬

Add this event to your Google Calendar!  (which includes the Zoom information)

Please come along to our discussion to share what you've been reading/watching/listening to/experiencing!

If you're looking for something interesting to read, check out our page of past and future reads at http://www.mid.miamioh.edu/library/bookdiscussion.htm

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Sharon Gerald is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

New books (and more) added to the Gardner-Harvey Library in March!

 

=

We add many new items to the collection each month, and we hope you'll check some out.  We've come a long way in growing the collection since this photo was taken in in the early 1970s (and the trees have grown, too)! Take a look at our New Books shelves or skim down our new materials list of items we added to the collection in March! We had a bumper crop this month, adding 324 books, e-books, DVDs, and other items during that time, thanks to your selections and suggestions. The list can be sorted by call number, area of our collection, or by title. There is definitely something here for everyone!

Here are ten titles from the list, to give you an idea of what we've been buying: 

• China and the Uyghurs : a concise introduction / Morris Rossabi
• Can we unlearn racism? : what South Africa teaches us about Whiteness / Jacob R. Boersema
• There is nothing for you here : finding opportunity in the twenty-first century / Fiona Hill
• Who's Black and why? : a hidden chapter from the eighteenth-century invention of race / edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew S. Curran
• The devil never sleeps : learning to live in an age of disasters / Juliette Kayyem
• Persuading with data : a guide to designing, delivering, and defending your data / Miro Kazakoff
• Woman running in the mountains / Yūko Tsushima
• Zoo ethics : the challenges of compassionate conservation / Jenny Gray
• The invisible kingdom : reimagining chronic illness / Meghan O'Rourke
• Russian 'hybrid warfare' and the annexation of Crimea : the modern application of Soviet political warfare / Kent DeBenedictis

This tag will show you all of the prior lists of new materials, in reverse chronological order. We are eager to hear from you about individual items you would like us to buy, or types of items we should be on the look out for, or general subject areas we should build up in the collection.

If you have a suggestion of something to order, please use our "Tell GHL to Buy It" form, email Alan Kelley (kelleya@miamioh.edu), or drop by the library with your request. And pass your general suggestions or comments about the collection to us in those same ways. 

Thanks again for keeping our collection vibrant and your information needs met!

National Park Talk: Denali National Park (Apr. 19)

 

Join us for an overview of Denali National Park and its geology on Tuesday, April 19 at 4:45pm, either in the Gardner-Harvey Library SPACE (Room GRD 014 on the library's lower level) or on Zoom (Join us in Zoom). 

Dr. Tammie L. Gerke, Associate Teaching Professor in Geology at Miami University, will share the geology and other interesting information about the national park. Get your questions answered and participate in a lively discussion on this national treasure.

Add this event to your Google Calendar!

"Denali national park" by Domen Jakus is marked with CC BY-NC 2.0.