Thursday 6 August 2015

Very active customers = busy library staff

We've just had a look at the circulation and reservation data for July & if you thought that you've been busy in July, we've got the stats to show that this is true!  However it is worth looking at longer term data to see that almost every month since we've had accurate statistics* loans have topped 1M per month.

Total checkouts for the last 4 months have been as follows:
July      1,163,108 - the highest monthly figure since rollout was completed
June     1,045,566
May      1,060,923
April     1,026,133

For the April - June quarter total loans were 3,132,622.  And total loans for the 9 months from October to June = 9,388,249

And as for holds data we can report the following figures:
July      187,396 - the highest monthly figure to date
June     174,679
May      172,394
April     164,308

For the April - June quarter total holds were 511,381


And related to being busy - although the Statewide subscription to Zinio commenced less than a week ago, by yesterday afternoon the system had 560 new customers, and the total customer base had checked out 4,147 magazines - in less than 5 days.  I imagine that this figure will increase significantly once the promotional activities have been in full swing for a while. 

And regarding promotion of e-resources, I am very impressed with the Charles Sturt Enterprise site, and the series of pics on the front page which are advertising Zinio, Lynda, e-books and their Digital Hub.  It looks great.


* I mention "accurate statistics" because up until the last library joined the consortium in September 2014, as we added a library's circ data all items which were on loan in their old system counted as new loans on the new system for the month that their data was loaded.  Does that make sense? An example would be that when we loaded Burnside in July 2014, they may have had 25,000 items on loan, which had been lent in April, May and June.  But these 25,000 loans would all be counted as new loans for July.  So our accurate aggregated service wide circulation figures have been accurate from October 2014.