Library Snapshot Day: Show-Me Your Library Captures One Day in the Library’s Life
October 21, 2010 — Some 8,248 people visited the 10 branches and bookmobile in the Springfield-Greene County Library District on Sept. 21 – dubbed Library Snapshot Day: Show-Me Your Library. Visitors on that day also checked out 14,908 items.
Library staff devoted that one day to collecting statistics about how library customers use the services, and they captured photographs throughout the day and collected comments from visitors about why the library is important to them.
The goal was to collect information on a single day in the life of the library district to show indisputable proof of the value that the district’s early literacy programs, free computer training, online catalog and databases and more provide for the lives of citizens.
Here’s a snapshot of what went on in one day in the library district:
- Some 384 vehicles were served through library drive-up windows.
- Reference staff answered 934 reference questions.
- Four people registered to vote.
- Pages shelved 8,503 items.
- Patrons attended 39 computer/technology classes through the Edge Community Technology Center and mobile Edge to the Rescue program.
- Patrons conducted the most searches -- 2,321 -- in the 5 p.m. hour on the online catalog, COOLcat.org, but also conducted 239 online searches in the 1 a.m. hour.
- Patrons checked out 14,908 items and checked in 14,367 items. They placed 3,632 holds, or reserves, on materials.
- A Facebook page created just for that day, Facebook.com/snapshotday, had more than 300 photographs posted by staff and customers, including Springfield Mayor Jim O’Neal.
- And many people expressed comments like this one from a patron at the Library Station: “It’s easy to go to McDonald’s and feed your stomach, but I come to the Library to feed my brain.”