Circulations per capita and per active cardholders
FOPL Data Report, Week 3 (+ the Primer)
This week, we have what is about the most popular per capita librarians calculate: circulations per capita and for each of the 304 Ontario public libraries we have focused on. 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.
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 the large number of Ontario libraries, the lists in this Report are rather long given the 304 libraries in our dataset and the fact that we have the two reports.
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.
Here’s a 12 page PDF of these numbers for Ontario public libraries sorted by population band.
FOPL_Report_3_ROT_circulations_bands