Last week we gave you the 2001-2013 rankings of circulation and cardholder comparisons of measurements in Ontario’s public libraries and ranking and comparing libraries by their population bands.
This week we look into programs held and program attendance from Ontario Public Libraries, 2001-2013.
Programs Held and Program Attendance Ontario Public Libraries, 2001-2013, All Reporting EACH Year: FOPL Data Report, Second series
Our first report in this new series reporting the updated Ontario public library data suggests that demand for traditional library services is waning. However, as we all know, we are as busy as ever. How could both facts be true? It appears from the data we are looking at that our users perhaps are changing what they seek from libraries and, as we will see, the services offered by the province’s libraries are adapting to a new information environment. Here we look at programs offered at Ontario’s libraries and attendance at them. The enclosed tables have summary data for all of the 301 of Ontario’s public libraries reporting each year and the breakdowns by the eight bands by population plus the First Nations’ libraries. The rightmost columns indicate growth rates for the period and the most recent years. The charts are based on the summaries for all 301 libraries.
Programs and attendees are counted and reported but these numbers are not quite like circulations or other numbers which are sometimes handled by machines with no human intervention. These variables measure things which do have an impact on libraries and their users but programs are different from measures like circulations or expenditure figures. With programs, library staff have to organize a program, promote it, and residents in the local area have to plan to be at the program and show up. This is a number with impact. It conveys a two-way commitment and one showing libraries engaged with their communities. Circulations and the percentage of cardholders to the population may be declining but when libraries offer programs, that population shows up as the data presented here show clearly.
The Ministry’s new data—the 2011-2013 reports offer a richer set of data and one new set of items is a disaggregation of programs. That is, information on the types of programs offered were solicited from the libraries As of this writing, these categories offer a just a hint of what might be gleaned from them.
We turn to the table with information on programs and their attendance at Ontario’s public libraries. The figures pretty much speak for themselves and they show strong growth in both programs offered (doubling from 100,000 to 200,000) and attendance at them (2,000,000 to 3.7 million) over the period. The total number of programs held from 2001-2013 at these libraries was 1.8 million with 35.7 million attendees. The two charts show a these results graphically. We may conclude that programs are a strong point in the changing information environment.
It is likely safe to conclude that library users are coming to these programs for many reasons but given that libraries are in the information business, it is reasonable to suspect for now that these libraries’ populations are showing up to learn how to deal with this rapidly changing information environment. Helping users learn how to operate in a complex information environment is, of course, is a role libraries have fulfilled for ages.
Here is this week’s chapter: W3_Library_Programs (1)
Stephen Abram
Executive Director, FOPL