One of the difficult parts of the annual public library survey has not just been what to count, but where to report what is counted. This is true for reporting revenue, expenditures, staffing, and other things, but the focus here today is where to count electronic stuff. While it is relatively easy to count print materials (books and serials), audio physical materials (CD’s and playaways), and video physical materials (DVD’s or VHS for the old skoolers), counting the downloadable versions of those items and other electronic things becomes a bit trickier.
More and more often libraries are offering online access to things, including language and other educational courses, music and video downloads, downloadable magazines, and others. Now, when considering reporting these types of things, the key element here is to first ask this question: Is the electronic stuff checked out and returned (even if the return is that it magically disappears from your device after a set checkout period)? If so, then most of the time these are reported under one of three holdings categories on the survey: (1) eBooks; (2) Audio Downloadable Units; or (3) Video Downloadable Units. These are all reported on your survey in section 4, Library Services. The kicker here is that if you report these electronic items in the holdings part of the survey (section 4), you also need to report the number of times they are used (circulation), in section 5, Library Services, and
vice versa. This represents a slight change in the data element definition in previous years, due to a vote by state data coordinators. Example: You report x number of OverDrive holdings, and x number of circulations. It gets tricky when we consider content that has a set circulation period but the library doesn’t select the items available to the user. Hoopla would be a good example of this, where the library pays for access to the vast quantity of items in the Hoopla collection, and then pays per item downloaded by the patron. The patron selects the item they want to read, watch, or listen to. This is well known as “patron driven acquisition”, and makes sense in that the library isn’t purchasing things that might sit on the shelf collecting dust or just infrequently used. Now for these things, reporting holdings is a bit tricky because even though the user may have access to millions of items, the library only pays for items that are downloaded or used. In this case, the holdings information can be reported in a reverse-engineered fashion based on the number of uses. You have 10,000 eBooks downloaded in the FY (out of 1.2 million available)? You report 10,000 eBooks held, and 10,000 uses. The Dude doesn’t know any other way to report this. Keep in mind that the important number here is the uses, so don’t get too caught up on the holdings reporting. And this only applies to things that circulate all the way around (e.g. are “returned”)
This post is part 1 of reporting electronic stuff. Part 2 will explain the data element changes for databases, which have been re-named “electronic collections”. Shaka.
