Library Board Meeting Date: February 14th, 2024
To: Library Board Members
From: Natalie Draper, Library Director
Title
Library Strategic Plan Update.
Body
Action Requested:
The Library Board receives an update regarding staff activities.
Summary Report:
The attached staff report includes items not included as agenda items for this meeting.
A note on the statistics that accompany this report, as some may look at this sheet every month and wonder what to make of it.
This report is a compilation of many of the monthly stats we gather that go into the Minnesota Public Library Annual Report (MPLAR), which the Library Board must approve in March every year before we submit it to the state. Those reports eventually go to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the federal body that provides funding to states for libraries and museums, among other things.
This month, staff have highlighted the stats that are most likely to tell a story about activity in the library. As activity varies based on time of year, it is best to look at the aggregate data when it all comes together in the spring. This is a better indicator of impact and emerging trends from year to year. While every data point in this report tells a story about how the community uses their library, few of the data points exist independent of the others, and even altogether we don’t have a complete picture for there are many uses of the library that are harder to track. For instance, Internet use (more accurately computer use) may decline in tandem with increasing WIFI use, and print circulation may be replaced by digital so those numbers can be seen as a pair. It may be less obvious where to track in-house use of library laptops.
Visits to the library, highlighted, are trending back to 2019 levels so we know there are other ways the library is serving the community that isn’t easy to measure, but you can look at wear and tear on the furniture and say “people are gathering here”. And, as new services are added, we will be reporting use on those as well to complete the picture. Notary service is relatively new to the report, and not reported to the state, and we will soon be telling you how many passport applications we are accepting. These data points will shed some light on increased foot traffic that doesn’t show up in circulation data, but won’t explain it all because there are many people who never use the collection but come to the library every day.
Programming numbers fluctuate but in general we are seeing more attendance, perhaps most notably with teens. One trend not apparent in the tracking is the number of hours of programming provided by the library, and what percentage is provided in Spanish or both English and Spanish. Also of note is the addition of a new report: the Oasis is online and tracking circulation, visits, and soon, programming. We will be reporting the Oasis as a branch in next year’s annual report. For the Oasis to count as a branch it must be staffed at least 20 hours a week. Currently we are, and providing unstaffed “Open+ hours” when the CAC entrance is open to the public.
The library is still emerging, in some ways, from the pandemic. Habits have changed and some may be more permanent changes: print circulation (highlighted at the top) was trending back up for a while after a sharp decline in 2020, but not quite back to pre-pandemic numbers. Then it declined again some and has mostly plateaued in 2023. This is consistent with national trends of in adult reading habits. However, digital circulation (also highlighted) has increased sharply over the past few years and will likely continue for some time. After this year, we will begin combining that data in this report for the board to see circulation more holistically; a book is book, whether electronic or paper, and separating those doesn’t make as much sense as it once did. We will still report the stats separately to the state as required, but will work on condensing information in these reports to be more readable. Some of our collections are important to identify separately, such as “equipment” checkout. It is not new but has certainly increased of late as our library of things grows; we’ve added hotspots, Roku boxes, laptops, and many other popular items under this line.
Library cardholders, highlighted, is a more complex number that fluctuates quite a bit, both at mid-year when we purge the database of inactive cards, and over time with increases or decreases to the local population. We will continue to report it but to give context, staff will note when the database is purged annually of library cards that have “expired” due to inactivity. We have substantial college population that turns over regularly with graduations, and a healthy database is one that is cleaned of inactive records regularly. It may be more valuable to convert the total number of cardholders to a percentage of the local population, which currently means around 72% of Northfield has a library card.
And finally, we have been missing wireless use statistics for many months due to equipment failure and hope to begin reporting those numbers again soon.
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Tentative Timelines:
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