I recently posted to my Facebook page that I was working on the fun part of stats. Immediately a friend replied that she wasn't aware that there was a fun part. Another friend suggested the fun part was when you are done. He was right (although he later confirmed my suspicion that he was talking about the beer you drink when you are done). The data tabulation is a necessary evil: the fun part for me is looking for patterns once all the data is there.
This year's "annual report" is a little different from previous years: the deadline is moved up so it's really an 11 month report (Sept 2009-July 2010). And it's needed urgently so I'll work on the full stats for comparison with last year later. But, I have identified a couple of cool things I'd like to share with you.
Quick Checks:
Our self service check-out machines have been very popular. The account for about 23% of the 326,291 loans we charged out over the past 11 months.
Email Reference:
The Access Sups answered 501 Ask-A-Librarian (email reference) questions on Access Services topics, or about 14% of the total traffic on AAL.
Offsite:
We discarded over 50,000 duplicate volumes (including print journals we have electronically) and sent 253,218 low-use titles offsite. We now have about a million items at our Clancy-Cullen managed facility in Patterson, New York. This year users requested 21,667 items. Although still a reasonable 2% recall rate, this number is three times what it was last year.
Recalls:
28,898 recalls were placed on materials charged out by other users. This means that 9% of all check-outs are recalled. While certainly staggering, this number isn't all that surprising: recalls jumped when we rolled out Aleph, presumably because the request button is more prominent.
Stacks:
Our Stacks staff shelved 532,879 bound volumes and 7,078 current periodicals and newspapers. Last year's numbers appear to be an anomaly, but if you look over the past two years in-house use is down 15% while general reshelving is up 6%.
Microforms:
Microform use is down 18% but is still over 8,000 uses for the year.
Entrances:
I'm still waiting for final numbers on swipes into Bobst (usually they are over a million) but we issues 2,210 collection passes, 14,905 general passes and 9,838 visitor passes for a grand total of almost 27,000 passes, many of which allow multiple entries.
Quick Search:
The number of Quick Searches placed is down about 15% to 2,772. Percentages found on the three searches remains just about the same (58%).
Interlibrary Lending:
We filled 13,444 of the 24,333 requests we received or 55%. Common reasons we are unable to fill requests are that we lack the volume requested (27%), the item is in use or in processing (18%), the item is non-circulating (18%) or the item is not on the shelf (12%).
Interlibrary Borrowing:
We obtained 30,281 of the 40,005 items requested by our users. By far the most common reason we cancel borrowing requests is because we own the item (42%). Other reasons include not being able to fill the request by the user's deadline (13%), or the item is not available from all possible lenders (17%). The number of returnable (book) ILL requests is on the rise: this year 61% of our requests were for returnables.
Reserve:
We processed 1,158 course lists, 4% less than last year. We also created 1012 durable links for professors in 146 courses (that they can then add to their blackboard courses). This number is also down compared with last year.
There is still a lot more to do for our annual report before I get that beer, but I wanted to share some of what I had found out with you.
