The Library

Numbers Provide Broad Picture of Library Use

Published June 9, 2019

“What’s new at the library?” is a question we hear often. We love talking about the library’s Next New Thing: a 24-hour library kiosk… a record-breaking Friends book sale… Hot Spots to check out… But that’s only part of it.

Plenty of things happen in the library world that don’t capture headlines, but they do capture a broader picture of the library – through numbers. Here are a few of them.  

• The 24-hour kiosk, the Library Express West on West Chestnut Expressway, has been busy since opening in February 2019. April saw 909 item checkouts; 811 in May.
• 36 feet. That’s the length of the new cyber bar the library buildings & grounds staff built at the Library Station.
• In the last 12 months, the Library Center and Library Station processed 6,134 U.S. passport applications.
• The Interlibrary Loan Department loaned or borrowed 84,449 items last year with libraries nationwide through Interlibrary Loan, MOBIUS and Prospector. If the department were a library branch, it would be busier circulation-wise than the Willard, Fair Grove, Strafford, Park Central and Ash Grove branches. (Through MOBIUS, alone, you have access to more than 29 million items from 192 institutions in Missouri, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas and Texas.)
• The Friends of the Library approved grants of $109,900 for special events and programs for 2019-2020.
• 788 adults attended computer skills classes, tutorials and one-on-one sessions at library branches, offsite locations and at the Edge Community Technology Center October 2018-May 2019.
• With 2 million visitors annually to the combined 10 library branches, the library district ranks as Greene County’s second-largest attraction, behind Bass Pro Shops/Wonders of Wildlife.
• The public booked meeting rooms 26,201 times last year.
• The Library’s Outreach Department – Mobile Library, Walking Books, off-site services – is the fourth-busiest lender in the library district, with 184,540 checkouts in one year.
• If you checked out one book, one DVD, one music CD and downloaded one e-book instead of buying them, you would save about $83, according to the Library Use Value Calculator.
• Patrons checked out 3.2 million items last year; 268,760 of those were digital media – e-books, digital audiobooks, videos, music and magazines from OverDrive, Hoopla and RBdigital.

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