More this week on expenditures:
Total Operating Expenditures and Materials Expenditures, 2001-2013, Ontario Public Library Totals and by Bands: FOPL Data Report. Second Series
The Ministry’s data on Ontario’s public libraries include a number of expenditure variables some of which we have touched on before. We will focus here on the Total Operating Expenditures and two categories of materials expenditures: General Materials Expenditures and Electronic Materials Expenditures.
There are two summary tables and nine tables for the detailed data by Bands by year printed on four pages. The first page has a table of totals for the nine bands for 2013 and also summary data for all of our 301 libraries for 2001-2013. Calculations of percent increases from 2001 to 2013 are highlighted in bold.
These tables are revised from the first FOPL reports and readers might note the totals here are different from those earlier tables. Some mistake in analysis resulted in incorrect data being published in that earlier set of data.
The first two summary tables give the totals for the three expenditure figures for all of our 301 Ontario Public Libraries from 2001-2013 and the second has the summary data for the period by Bands.
The big number here is $7 billion which is the total of Operating Expenditures for the 301 libraries for this period. Of that amount, $680 million was spent on General Materials Expenditures and $110 million was spent on Electronic Materials. Two of these variables were plotted in charts in the third report in this new series. The Operating Expenditures increased over the period (+65%) but the Electronic Materials Expenditures increased dramatically (+500%), as we could reasonably expect. The commitment to such digital materials was also reflected in the fourth of these reports where the numbers of digital materials and their growth in Ontario’s public library collections were discussed. General Materials Expenditures increased but just by 15%. Spending for Electronic Materials went from about 6% of General Materials Expenditures in 2001 to about a third in 2013.
Looking to the second summary table, we see that during the period, the largest libraries spent 56% of the total amount (in red) spent by all libraries over the period with the First Nation’s libraries accounting for less than 1% of the total $7 billion.
Let us look at the first page with its three tables for Bands 1-3. The columns starting from the left should be clear. We have the Year for the data in that row, the number of libraries in each of the bands, and then we get to the two columns of Total Operating Expenditures. The first is the average of the Total Operating Expenditures for that Band’s libraries and the next is the total itself. Again, we see the largest libraries are very large.
Moving to the right, we have the first of the summary columns with the numbers in bold. The 54 in bold beside the 2013 summary figure is the percent growth of the Total Operating Expenditures from 2001 to 2013 and in Band 1, that increase is 54% Band 2’s growth was 70% and Band 3’s was 91%. While the percentage growth over the period at the Band 1 libraries was the smallest of the nine Bands, the dollar amount was the largest of the Bands.
Continuing on to the right, we come upon two General Materials Expenditure columns with data and, as with the Total Operating Expenditures, we have the average and then the totals by year for the libraries in Band 1 and then the growth percentage, again in bold, by the 2013 data. The General Materials Expenditures increased 14% in Band 1 over the period having fallen from its peak in 2009. This number increases in all Bands, albeit in varying amounts. Operating expenditures rise as do the expenditures for general materials.
And now we come to the Electronic Materials Expenditures which increase for all Bands but the First Nations’ libraries where an obvious anomaly disrupts the same conclusion for these libraries. In 2001, two of these libraries reported Electronic Materials Expenditures of over $25,000, and the total for this variable that year was over $60,000. In 2002, it was $7,000 for the same libraries. These numbers were discussed in the first series of these reports as was how to deal with such curious values.
It is possible these numbers were reported correctly but it is also possible that there is an error somewhere. In any case, three of the percentage changes from 2001 to 2013 for the First Nations’ libraries are affected by these anomalous values and result in decreases in the expenditures for electronic materials, and hence, growth percentages, clearly an atypical pattern when compared with the experience seen by the other Ontario public libraries. If we calculate the change not from 2001 but from 2002 to 2013 for this Band, we have a different result. Those results are in parentheses beneath the calculated values and seem more in keeping with what we see at the other libraries. This result should be expected at the province’s libraries respond to a changing information environment. As we move to digital storage and availability of the human record, libraries are moving to these new media.
A Note on Bands as Used in These Reports
We have 13 years of data here and these are years of substantial and dynamic growth. The Ministry defines these Bands in terms of Resident Population as of today. Today, Band 1 has 8 libraries with a Resident Population greater than 250,000. In 2001, only 6 libraries had a Resident Population greater than 2001.
Our analysis of the libraries in the various Bands is an attempt to hold constant a dynamic set of libraries as they report over time. Libraries change. Some lose population; some gain population; and definitions change. An advantage of a study of cohorts of libraries over time is that we have a means of segmenting our libraries by size and getting like libraries with libraries similar (commonly) in size of Resident Population. It is a common method for handling skewed distributions as discussed in the Primer.
The analyst has three choices in abstract: to take the libraries in cohorts in 2001, in cohorts as they exist each year, or as they lie in cohorts in 2013. We chose the latter and, in effect, imposed the Band structure of the Ministry—with our addition of a separate cohort of the First Nations’ libraries in a separate cohort—on each years data. As a result, we are not capturing great changes in the experiences of libraries as they change cohorts either up or down. This information is surely of interest—why do some libraries do better in these measures against their peers and why do some do worse?–but we are interested first in getting a handled on the health and the state of the Ontario public library system. S
Here is this week’s chapter: W8_Expenditures_by_bands
Stephen Abram
Executive Director, FOPL