More detailed ranking data on circulation and cardholders this week.
Circulations per capita and per active cardholder Ranked by Bands: FOPL Data Report, Second Series
About the most popular per capita statistic librarians calculate is circulations per capita and for this report, as in the First Series, we rank each of the 301 Ontario public libraries we have focused on by this figure within their size Bands. As with in the FOPL First Series of these reports, we are going to add circulations per active cardholders to the mix to give a bit of balance. This is just another kind of “per capita” and one that tries to capture the actual use by the active cardholders.
As we said in January, this newer number gives us another view of the libraries’ populations. There are people in the area who are served by the library but who never make use of the library or who might make use of it in ways we cannot capture by traditional measures. A job seeker who uses the library but who never checks out a book will not show up in this set of statistics. These data are still useful and they do give us deeper information but show that the problem of assessing libraries is a bit more difficult for us than for our colleagues who ran libraries years ago, doesn’t it? They did not have all the rich digital content we have now. Given there are 301 libraries in our analysis, the lists in this Report are rather long and, too, we have the two sets of variables analyzed. Roughly, then, we have data on these libraries twice. Remember that there are a few libraries in most of these lists which do not report this or that variable.
Why do per capita measures? The reader will recollect that in the FOPL Primer, we discussed the fact that library distributions are usually “skewed.” Many small libraries and a few big ones. Librarians often use terms like “80-20” to describe this fact. As it happens, this distribution is so well known, it has a formal name, it is a “Pareto distribution” after Vilfredo Pareto, a 19th century polymath. Pareto distributions are common and the fact we find them in the library world would not surprise most social scientists or Statisticians. A few very big; many very small. How do we analyze such distributions?
In the library world, as discussed in the Primer, historically we group by size and compare like sizes. The few big libraries we often look at separately from the small libraries. Librarians who are studying the data for budget justifications will look for like libraries for comparisons. “Like” usually means by size and size usually means by population served.
Of course, sometimes, we look at all Ontario libraries and will sum the data from these libraries for other purposes than doing an analysis for one library. How many items circulated at the Ontario public libraries in 2013? How much do they spend? How many people do these libraries serve? Those are important questions and they relate to how Ontario provisions library service in an information society competing in a global marketplace. This is the crucial Information Policy question and these data can be marshaled to provide evidence for aiding libraries in their budget discussions and management as well as informing the Information Policy discussions.
There are two sets of tables in this Report. The first set is the traditional circulations per capita and the second the newer measure: circulations per active library cardholder. All three variables: resident population, active library cardholders, and total annual circulations are reported by the Ministry in 2013 and are used to make these calculations. The data are sorted by the each of the circulations per capita figures by the Bands discussed in previous Reports. These Bands are by size of resident population served which are adapted from those of the Ministry, with the change of First Nations’ libraries in a separate category. There are, then, nine of these Bands included in this Report.
We believed when a similar Report for the 2010 data was issued in FOPL’s first series in January, it was the first time these calculations have been made for all Ontario public libraries and published broadly. This fact had implications that still hold. Among them:
A number of the libraries—particularly smaller ones, report 0 circulations or 0 populations. Why? Do they not circulate items? Or have no users? Not likely. It is another characteristic of data that on occasion, there are missing data and we can only speculate about why.
Still, their data are important for questions relating to Ontario’s provisioning of library service and also questions of Information Policy—what is Ontario’s policy to respond to the Information Age? We bear that question in mind for the future.
Here is this week’s chapter: W6_Circs_per_capita.
Stephen Abram
Executive Director, FOPL