[Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDA

[Rick Anderson]

A lower rate of overall book circulation is often given as a reason for moving to DDA. It is taken as an indication that either librarians aren’t buying the right books or books are less valuable to patrons. Accepting this reasoning, however, demonstrates a lack of critical thought and ignorance of or deliberate ignoring of data.

Not necessarily. For example, I’ve gathered data for one major subset of academic libraries that shows not only a significant decrease in circulation itself, but also that when enrollment trends are taken into account, the rate of decrease is sharper than raw circulation figures themselves indicate. This study required me to gather (by hand) all circulation and enrollment data reported by approximately 120 ARL libraries over a 13-year period. I published my study in Library Journal (http://bit.ly/1iPRK3A) and included links to the complete data set so that anyone who wishes to can check my analysis or run analysis of their own.

Obviously, my study was only of ARL libraries, and it would be a mistake to assume that its findings are necessarily typical for all kinds of libraries, and Amy is absolutely right to say that none of us should assume that any study done at another library will necessarily tell us what’s going on in our individual libraries. All of us need to make strategic decisions about collection development based on what’s happening with our patrons in our institutions. In my own library, our usage trends track very closely to those of ARL libraries as a whole—and our reshelving statistics are down sharply as well over the same period. (Interestingly, both our circ and our reshelving rates have ticked up a bit over the past couple of years, suggesting that usage is bottoming out and may not decline much further.)

I join Melissa in inviting Amy to share more information about the print use rates she’s seeing at Bowling Green State. Is the data set available?

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Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
rick.anderson at utah.edu<mailto:rick.anderson at utah.edu>
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