The Ubiquitous Librarian (Brian Mathews)

While Reference Stats Decline, Oregon surges +51%. A glimpse at some ARL outliers

I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers this week and it is a great book... but I like all his stuff. The section on Asian students and math/work ethic is really good and I really liked his analysis on sports and age limit deadlines. There is also some good parenting advice in there as well.

Anyway, my colleague Jon Bodnar and I are working on a handful of writing projects and this theme of outliers started to standout for me. We are currently processing a ton of ARL stats and I became very interested in the idea of who is outperforming the overall trends. This post is in no why authoritative, statistically valid, or what have you—just something I found interesting and that wanted to share. Jon’s office is right beside mine and so we’ve been discovering these types of epiphanies all week long.  It has been a good week.

Reference Questions
Overall the trend is downward. Nothing new here, we’ve all been hearing that for years. When you look at 1995 to 2005 the ARL average drops about 47%. That is a lot fewer questions!

Ah, but not at Oregon. The Ducks report a +51% increase in reference queries during this time period. Interesting, but why? Did they add service points? Did they renovate or change the layout? Did they alter the way they record stats? I am sure there are many variables, but I just found it fascinating that while everyone else declined they surged so much.

Other Reference Outliers:

• Columbia (+46%)
• Toronto (+40%)
• Washington (+38%)
• Cincinnati  (+36)

There were a total of 12 libraries that saw an increase during this period, the other 83 saw a decline.
NOTE: Not all member libraries provided data.

Total Circulation
Total circulation is another area that has seen an overall decline. From 1995 – 2005 the average total circ count per ARL library is down 11%. Not bad really. The steepest drop is -68%, but overall -11% seems decent. I would have suspected about -30 or -40%, but what do I know? One think I do know is that patrons at Ohio State love to borrow books! During this same period OSU saw a +110% increase in circulation. I didn’t believe it at first but visited their website to double check—indeed it is true. So again, why? They have been building a new library for years, but I would think that would hurt circulation. Are they circulating more DVDs? More reserves? Why are they busting the overall trend? That is a substantial increase!

Other Circulation Outliers:
Columbia (+66%)
Harvard (+59%)
Southern Illinois (+52%)
Utah (+40%)

There were a total of 32 libraries that saw an increase during this period, the other 73 saw a decline.
NOTE: Not all member libraries provided data.

Instruction
Last but not least: instruction. ARL asks for groups as well as total participants involved with instruction. My feeling is that there is some inconsistency here. I mean, do you only count classroom sessions? What about orientations? What about tours?  This is very subjective. If I help four students working together on an assignment does that count as a group or is that four reference queries?  Maybe both? Or maybe just one query? In other words, take this section with a grain of salt. I doubt all 100+ libraries are following the same counting practices.

From 1995 to 2005 there has been a significant rise with instruction or at least in attendance.  The stat for “presentation participants” went up +40%. That’s huge.

And who saw the largest increase? Toronto with +392%. That’s right they taught just over 6,000 students in 1996 and then reached over 30,000 in 2005. Texas gets the top honor for most participants in 2005 with 61,042, but how did Toronto surge so much in such a short time? What’s the story? Did they get new classrooms? More librarians? A change in the curriculum?

Yale was another top outlier with a +361% increase. In 2005 they had over 10,000 people participate in instruction sessions--- that is pretty good for a school with just 5,300 undergraduates.
In fact, there were 22 libraries that saw triple digital percentage increases during this 10 year period. Only 19 schools saw a decrease with instruction, while the bulk was somewhere between 20% and 90%. Here is a quick trend line:

So again that question: why did Toronto (+392), Yale (+361), Boston (+276), Columbia (+259), and Emory (+227) pull far ahead of everyone else? Did these organizations decide to really push instruction? Did the faculty really embrace information literacy? Did they all start counting the ten minute overviews that librarians give at new student orientation events as “instructional” sessions? Who knows? Columbia ended up in the top five of all three catagories-- why? Why them instead of Cornell or Harvard or Wisconsin or UCLA?

As I mentioned, Jon and I are hacking at some data that really has nothing to do with this topic— this is my tangent. I just find it incredibly fascinating to look at the data and piece together stories. Gladwell of course would go three levels deeper and rationalize what happened at each place and could tell us why Columbia was so successful. I am just aiming for an entertaining winter break blog post.

And the most “satisfying” library is…

I’m working on a mega-LibQUAL+ project, essentially dumping all the data from large universities into an Excel file. This allows for benchmarking: 1) it lets me see who the top libraries are with specific questions (comfortable space, website, etc), and 2.) it let’s me comparatively track my library’s progress over time.

So far I have the undergraduate data for 75 libraries (mostly ARL with a few notable exceptions) and about half the faculty data. I am pulling from 2003 – 2007, entering the most current numbers available. Excel’s “paste special --–> transpose” is great and so is LibQUAL+ Analytics Tool.

LibQUAL+ is not a perfect measurement, but it’s all we’ve got in terms of national benchmarking. And user satisfaction is far more valuable than collection size. (No disrespect to the HYP.) What I like about my satisfaction tool is that it equalizes everything. It goes beyond simply comparing my perceptions against your perceptions, and instead takes all the data points into account.  It asks the more global question: “how full is your glass?” (How satisfied are your patrons?)

If you look through your LibQUAL+ results PDF, you’ll find barometer charts, like this:

Your goal is for that orange line to fill as much of that gray box as possible; the more the better.

And so, looking at all the undergraduate data, which library ranks highest? The home team: Texas A&M. They invented the tool and run it every year, so I have to discredit them, sorry Colleen.

So who is number two? Georgia Tech. I was shocked and had to triple check all the data. But indeed, in terms of pure satisfaction, our participants responded most favorably across the 22 questions collectively. In all sincerity, we got lucky. We conducted our survey just as we finished a major renovation and benefited from good buzz. By comparison, our pre-renovation numbers would have placed us 25 out of 75 libraries.

I’ll be writing more on this once the faculty and graduate student numbers are collected, but here are a few findings:

Overall Customer Service: Cornell
Overall Library as Place: U of Kansas (really it was Texas A&M, but like I said, home team)
Comfortable & Inviting Location: U of Washington
Website: Clemson

When Consortiums Fail

Bit of an off topic rant today. I am very frustrated with my consortium lending process. Sure, it’s great that 35 libraries share their holdings, but can you imagine this scenario happening with Amazon?

Email from Warehouse #17:

Dear Brian,

We’re sorry but the book you requested is not in stock. Please fill out your order again and select a different location.

This has happened to me at least ten times (for different titles) this year alone. If a title is not found on the shelf at Library A, they should automatically send the request to Library B, or the next random library that has the book. I can imagine this being very frustrating and a waste of time for the patron. It also reflects badly on us—not only do we not carry the book, but our system fails them. I thought the shift was toward making it easier for customers?

I’m jumping on The Clue Train—hope it lives up to the hype!

I like LC but...

Thanks everyone for your interest in this blog.

Why do we make students learn the Library of Congress System? Does knowing that finance books are in the HG’s or that literature is somewhere in the P’s really enhance their lives? When they graduate and move on to the real world, where does the Library of Congress Classification system fit in? Surely not at their public library which probably uses Dewy. And let’s be honest, all the studies show that people use the web, not libraries. I have never met a student with exposure to LC prior to attending college, so why do we force them to learn it? I am not advocating a switch to Dewey, but rather that we just give people what they want… literally.

The Info Lit people are all about teaching students how to identify, evaluate, locate, and use information, but that is subjective. For me, if a student uses a library database (or any other tool) to find items that are not full-text than they have done their job. Why not provide free document delivery for them? For example, we don’t provide the current year of Science online, patrons ask for this ALL THE TIME, and we tell them they have to come in to read, photocopy, or scan it.

Why don't academic libraries provide a free document delivery system for all patrons? Many libraries offer this service to faculty or to distance learning students, but why not to all students?

Well, the University of Nevada does: doi:10.1016/S1464-9055(02)00309-3   The article (which is quite revolutionary!) is about the claiming of journals, but makes this statement:

"The Libraries stopped charging Nevada students and employees any fees for document delivery, and established a free on-campus delivery service. With check-in, the tacit message to patrons had been “You’re looking for an article in the June issue of the Atlantic ? Yes, that issue has been checked in. Go look on the shelves, and if it isn’t there, try again later.” The message now is “You’re looking for an article in the June issue of the Atlantic? It should be in the Current Periodicals stacks. Check there, and if it isn’t available at the moment, the University will get a copy of the article for you in about 24 hours at no charge. Would you like it delivered to your campus address in print form (again, at no charge), or would you like to be notified when you can retrieve it on the Web?”

Public libraries are in on this too. The Orange County Library System offers a great service called MAYL, which essentially includes the mailing of library materials to patrons for free. I have a friend in Orlando who told me he doesn’t have time to go to the library, but because of this service is able to order several books a month.

   

So the question is—do we want to be Blockbuster or Netflix?

   

The fact that most academic libraries will not allow users to submit a request (email, phone, or IM) for a book (let's leave articles aside for now) and have it available for them to pickup later seems very outdated. I mean, we  followed the trend of placing cafes into our libraries-- when are we going to adopt the other simple services that bookstores provide? When are we going to start making it easy for the patron?