You’ve now had 12 weeks of reports to digest and discuss. There have also been webinars about these data.
Here is a link to the full report that contains all of the weekly reports (83 Page PDF):
A note about Sources of data used in these reports
There are two sources of data on Ontario’s public libraries used for the Federation’s Reports. Both sources are from the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport.
The primary source is from the CSV files made available by the Ministry for the years 1999-2013 under an “Open Government Licence.”
As noted, the data from first two years proved sufficiently different from the rest that for these preliminary reports, we focused on the 2001-2010 data for the first series of reports and with the addition of the recently released data for 2011-2013, we have extended the time series from 2001-2013 for this second series of reports.
CSV files can be read into spreadsheet programs for manipulation and without re-keying the data. Re-keying is a source of error in data work and to be avoided if at all possible. The Web location for these files is at:
https://www.ontario.ca/arts-and-culture/ontario-public-library-statistics
There is a source which has reports of data from 1999-2013 here: http://www.mtc.gov.on.ca/en/libraries/statistics.shtml
These are in PDF format and are broken down by size and type of the libraries and then by similar variables, for instance: “Library Financial,” “Library Holdings,” and the like. There are 66 separate reports of the data for each year. Summary data for the year can be found in “Summary and Comparisons.” Publication this way follows traditional library practice with modern techniques of PDF files. One can print only those size ranges one is interested in. However, given that these are in PDF and would have to be keyed and that there are 66 such files for each year, using this source of data for a project like we have done with the Federation would have been daunting.
The Federation appreciates a grant from the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport which made some of the analysis of these data possible.
Stephen Abram
Executive Director, FOPL