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!