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Lately, a lot of the library forums and email lists I follow have been talking about printing the “amount saved” on every checkout receipt. Your Pryor Library has had this feature for over a year and it’s pretty remarkable to examine how much the library saves us.

Your “amount saved” is calculated by adding up the list price for each item you’ve checked out. For instance, if you check out 6 kids books and a DVD, your amount saved is around $142. I know this because it’s what I’ve got on my account right now. This means that had I gone to Barnes & Noble (or another retail establishment) and bought the same items I checked out from the library, I would have spend about $142.

If this trend continues, by the end of the year, using the library will have saved my family $1,800. (provided my four-year-old doesn’t color in any more library books.)That’s a lot of money we can then spend on groceries, clothes, school supplies, LEGO sets, etc.

In addition to keeping track of how much money the library saves each of our patrons each year, our system keeps track of how much we’ve saved all of our patrons together. I ran a quick report looking at the last six months (Aug. 1 through Feb. 11). The Pryor Public Library has saved our patrons $331,089.64 total. In the first 11 days of February, we saved our patrons almost $18,000. That’s $1,636 a day!

The “amount saved” calculation does not include things like research and other assistance from our staff, ebooks or audiobooks downloaded from Overdrive, our Ancestry.com subscription, or internet and wifi usage – all services that are widely used and provided at no cost to you.

I often tell people, “The Library is the best deal in town.” This is my evidence to justify that statement. Be sure to look at your “amount saved” on the bottom of your receipt!

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash

At the second City Council meeting of the month and at the Library’s Board of Trustees meeting, I always give a report on our library statistics. Generally speaking, I report the same statistics each month but this month, I reported two statistics I don’t normally touch on: the number of items added to the collection and the number of items checked out.

During the month of December, we added 233 new items to the collection. This is about average for what we do each month. The majority of the items we add are items we have selected and purchased, but some are donations. Most months, we add about 50 donations to the collection with the bulk of them going to our paperbacks.

We receive far more donations than we can add to the collection and every one is appreciated. If we can’t add a donation for whatever reason, it will either go to our perpetual book sale or to the free cart. Either way, it will generate money and/or goodwill for your library, so keep those donations coming! And thank you for thinking of us!

At the City Council meeting, I reported that at the time I put the report together we had 2,440 items checked out, or about 7% of of the total collection. At the time of this writing we have 2,591 items checked out (still about 7%).

Last year we started keeping a color-coded calendar for an easy way to tell when our busiest days are throughout the year. Our busiest day last year was September 12, 2018. We checked out almost 500 items that day. The next busiest were September 26 and October 17 with almost 400 items each. We were all surprised our top three days weren’t during the summer, but we assume these three days – all Wednesdays – were high checkout days due to storytime and visits from Thunderbird. Whatever the reason, we hope to see more of these days in 2019!

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

Back in October, I mentioned in this column that the library is working on our strategic plan. Back then, I said the goal was to have the plan written by the end of November and to begin implementation at the first of the year. The year we just started. Oh, what a young, naive thing I was three months ago!

I made several mistakes in that assertion: 1) I grossly underestimated how much time strategic planning takes; 2) I did not anticipate getting lost in the weeds of the data for a few weeks; and 3) I did not take into account the amount of time spent in the paralysis that comes with the realization of just how big a project we are undertaking.

When it is finally completed, our strategic plan will have four main components: A mission statement that clearly, if broadly, states what we want to do as a library, a set of values that explains the things the library really cares about when carrying out its day-to-day operations, a set of strategic priorities that reflects the community’s interest in what aspects of library service we should concentrate most on, and goals within those strategic priorities that we wish to accomplish in the next three years. It’s a daunting task to write this document.

Figuring out our goals is where I got lost in the data. From demographic data to comparing where we are against libraries serving a similarly sized populations and taking into account where the State wants us to be, I have looked at a whole lot of numbers and charts. Of course, that’s also where I got paralyzed by the enormity of the project.

The library’s staff and the library’s board are filled with so many smart, wonderful people who make the library better every day. Together, things are progressing much more smoothly. I won’t predict when, but look for our strategic plan soon!