Here are the full annual statistics from fiscal year 2021 (the 2020/21 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, yet another crazy year, following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic during the 2019/20 academic year. As we changed fiscal years at the end of June 2020, the library remained closed to the public through July and did not reopen until August 17 when Fall 2020 classes began. We lost 34 scheduled days in the building (about 14% of our total open days for the year). That did impact many of our library services, though during that time we managed to continue our services online alongside our Hamilton campus colleagues and in cooperation with our colleagues in Oxford. We are grateful for everyone's patience with us as we continued to work from home through the middle of August and then work split schedules on site and from home for the rest of the academic year.
These statistics reflect what happened between July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021. 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 4 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 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 848 books and DVDs from us (509 from our local collection, 197 ordered from other MU libraries, and 142 items ordered from OhioLINK - that means that 40% of the items used by campus patrons came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 45% decrease in total borrowing over 2019-2020.
- The GHL collection registered 2,557 checkouts (that's the 509 items checked out by Middletown patrons above, plus 1,437 items sent to OhioLINK users, and 611 sent to other MU libraries - that means that 80% of the uses of our materials came from libraries beyond GHL). That is a 19% decrease in total lending over 2019-2020.
- GHL patrons checked out 661 reserve items from us (this includes faculty-placed course reserves, textbooks on reserve, study rooms, laptops, iPads, and other equipment). That is a 74% decrease from 2019-2020. Textbooks on reserve checkouts totaled 33 in 2020-21, a decrease of 93% from 2019-20. The primary reason for both the reserves and the textbooks decreases was that courses on the Middletown campus were largely online for all of the 2020/21 academic year, and we were not checking out print reserves for much of year while we were practicing book quarantining (holding used materials for 3-5 days between uses to allow the COVID-19 virus to die off). University Libraries did institute the LOLA: Limited Online Library Access service in Fall 2020 to allow textbooks and other printed materials to be scanned and used by individuals. GHL staff scanned several of our most commonly used textbooks for use in the service.
- In terms of building up our collection, Middletown faculty, staff, and students ordered 1512 items to add to our collection this year. That is a 12% decrease from 2019-2020.
- We registered a total of 3,218 checkouts of items in our collection (reserves and circulating materials). The circulating items at GHL number 31,958, so each item in the collection circulated 0.10 times this year (all items in our library circulate).
The Quest for Information
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40 people visit our web site every day. That's a total of 14,510 visits for the year, by 3,947 unique individuals. That's a 8% increase in visits and a 1% increase in unique visitors from 2019-20.
- Gardner-Harvey Librarians also create and maintain subject guides to our databases and other information sources called LibGuides. In 2020-21, we were responsible for 124 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 26,791 visits during the year, for an average of 216 visits per guide.
Helping You Find What You Need
- In synchronous Zoom, Meet, and WebEx sessions, we gave library instruction presentations in 11 classes this year, reaching 218 students (a decrease of 72% from 2019-2020).
- Our Embedded Librarian program reached students from 26 course sections in their Canvas course sites during the academic year (that is a 33% decrease from 2019-2020). We helped over 549 students with their information needs through the program.
A Place for Work, Study, and Remove from the World
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GHL will be open 57 hours per week for Fall 2021, but we operated on reduced hours during Fall 2020, Spring 2021, and Summer 2021 (between 36 and 40 hours per week).
- We averaged 35 visitors per day, for a total of 8,676 visits this year. This reflects a 75% decrease from 2019-2020. Our best attended day was May 26, 2021, with 83 visitors. We had 37 days with 50 or more visitors (15% of our open days)
- In normal times, we regularly schedule the library learning lab (GRD 111) for single class sessions. We also schedule Study Room 110 for class sessions.
- With reduced capacity for social distancing and the need to use two of our rooms for furniture storage and book quarantining, we had seven study rooms checked out 389 times this year by students, faculty, and staff members. That represents a 70% decrease from 2019-20.
- We held several events on Zoom this year since we were unable to meet in person. We had a total of 18 events: 11 MUM Book Discussion Group meetings, 6 National Parks geology video/lectures by Dr. Tammie Gerke, and our Human Library event. Total attendance for Fall and Spring semesters was 128, for an average of 7 people per event.
- We provided 2 TEC Lab workshops in Fall 2020 with video instructions and take home kits. We also hosted sessions for the STEAM Studio program in Summer 2021.
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, and we look forward to a very different year in 2021/22).The Gardner-Harvey Library Staff
