Friday, December 12, 2003
A feelgood library story: An independent research study has found that for every £1 the British Library gets it generates £4 of value for the economy. I wonder what would happen if this method was used to evaluate public library authorities in the country.
As part of boring stock plan work I spent most of wednesday evaluating the use of stock at The Greenhouse, situated in the middle of a council estate. The method we use for this is highly scientific, every tenth book we make a note of how old it is, and how many times it has gone out in the last year. The stock was largely up to date, averages between two to three years for age of stock for what I've counted so far (admittedly due to rigorous weeding earlier in the year and an influx of stock from The Closed Library), but non-fiction issues have been extremely low. Very few of the books in the science section had gone out, and in the 600s, which covers health, engineering, cookery, gardening and management and business theory, it was a similar story, albeit with spikes of interest in health, driving theory and pets. The fiction was better and hopefully, when I get round to the 'Community Language' section that'll show heavy use. But is the way forward to tip more towards the areas of stock that are getting used more at the moment, or does that lead to a danger similar to that experienced by the Conservative Party, namely going more in one direction to please the core user group who use it already but risk alienating 'floating users' who would pop in on the off-chance?
As part of boring stock plan work I spent most of wednesday evaluating the use of stock at The Greenhouse, situated in the middle of a council estate. The method we use for this is highly scientific, every tenth book we make a note of how old it is, and how many times it has gone out in the last year. The stock was largely up to date, averages between two to three years for age of stock for what I've counted so far (admittedly due to rigorous weeding earlier in the year and an influx of stock from The Closed Library), but non-fiction issues have been extremely low. Very few of the books in the science section had gone out, and in the 600s, which covers health, engineering, cookery, gardening and management and business theory, it was a similar story, albeit with spikes of interest in health, driving theory and pets. The fiction was better and hopefully, when I get round to the 'Community Language' section that'll show heavy use. But is the way forward to tip more towards the areas of stock that are getting used more at the moment, or does that lead to a danger similar to that experienced by the Conservative Party, namely going more in one direction to please the core user group who use it already but risk alienating 'floating users' who would pop in on the off-chance?
