Libraries' Services, Collections Heavily Used by Students

At the end of March, 2008, we published a listing of the University Libraries’ five key accomplishments for the period July 1, 2007 through March 31, 2008. You are invited to view our Performance with Purpose accomplishments at
http://bsu.edu/library/media/pdf/Accomplishments-2007-2008.pdf.

Now that fiscal year 2007-2008 is completed, we have final counts for several important metrics that demonstrate our service performance outcomes. For example, our turnstile count shows that 1,311,438 persons passed through the Libraries’ turnstiles, an increase of 10,048 or 0.8% over the same period last fiscal year. We increased the number of library education sessions to 933, up by 1.2% over last fiscal year. Bracken Library was open to serve students and faculty for 360 days during the last fiscal year, offering 120.5 hours of service during the academic semesters and almost the same number of hours during interim periods.

Since the end of the fiscal year, we have been analyzing Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 data that we collect from our circulation records, public computer workstations, printer logs, and other sources. While the data for both the fall and spring semesters are very similar, I will review Spring 2008.

Interpretation of the data shows that of 3,582 freshmen, 44.9% of those students borrowed something from the Libraries. The data shows that 86.5% or 3,099 of our freshman used the Libraries’ public workstations at least once during the semester. Other data show that these same users represent 35,163 or 17.1% of the 205,397 computer sessions during Spring 2008 semester. Closely tied to utilization of the Libraries’ almost 400 public workstations is the use of our public printers. Our public laser printers, which offer students free printing from the desktop or laptop, were used by 3,207 freshmen, 65.0%, who executed 76,896 print jobs.

The data presents a lot of interesting and valuable information that will help librarians and library administrators to identify which student groups we need to work on even harder to attract to the University Libraries. Similar past analyses have been fruitful and we are succeeding in attracting more users to the Libraries. The data in this table shows that 88.7% of our freshmen have used at least one library service. This number grows for sophomores (91.7%), juniors (92.3%), and seniors (93.3%).