This week we dig deeper into expenditure measurements and comparisons.
Expenditures per capita and per active cardholder Ranked by Bands: FOPL Data Report, Second Series
This report is structured in a similar manner to the two sets of tables with per capita circulation figures for the 301 Ontario public libraries being examined in detail here. The tables in this report have expenditures per capita and expenditures per active library cardholders. Each library’s data appear in its Band and ranked in descending order.
Each of these calculations gives a different view of the experiences of these libraries. It is often said that we “weigh” evidence and that is an apt description of the process of considering what different views of the can tell us about that experience. What do these two per capita measures tell us? On the one had, expenditures per resident served gives a picture of a community’s support for its library but by looking at expenditures per cardholder, we have another view. The first (expenditures per capita) captures the support for the role of the library as a resource for all of its served population, even those who do not use a library’s resources directly because, of course, they benefit from the library, too. The expenditures per cardholder is a bigger number of each library because there are typically fewer cardholders than resident population.
Another consideration is a point we have made several times: as data are used, they improve. In our first series, we noted numbers which were improbably large or small and in the new data from the Ministry, there are fewer such anomalies but they still exist. When these results are more widely examined by the library community, the number of such anomalies will decline.
Here is this week’s chapter: W7_Expenditures_per_capita
Stephen Abram
Executive Director, FOPL