Collections Presentation - August 21, 2025 Library Commission meeting

City Librarian Michael Lambert

Thank you, President Wolf, and good evening, Library Commissioners, Library staff. 

Appreciate the opportunity to bring you an update on the latest collection utilization trends for our robust collections in both digital and physical formats. I'm pleased to report the fiscal year ending June 30th represents another banner year with a third consecutive year of setting an all-time new record for overall circulation. 

Shelley Cocking, our Chief of Collections and Technical Services [CTS], is joined by Alice Chan, our Collections and Technical Services Manager, Cataloging Manager. They are going to be presenting this presentation tonight. And I do want to emphasize that Shelley Cocking as the division chief, she really is the main architect in organizing our efforts to deliver customer focused collections that meet our residents needs for books and the content that they're seeking. Shelley, Alice, take it away...

Shellie Cocking

Thank you, Michael. Yes, I'm Shelley Cocking and this is Alice Chan, our collections and cataloging manager. We're going to talk about collection utilization trends and the library's role as a resource provider. 

This first slide shows you our seven-year circulation trend. And in CTS, we really want to take a look at how things have been changing since we closed for COVID. And you can see the orange part of the bar is for e-collections and the dark blue is for physical collections. During the closure, our e-collection circulation went up a lot. Our physical collection has continued to recover. But if you do look, even though we did have almost half a million increase in circulation, you will see that the increase has slowed a little bit this last year compared to the previous. So what that says to me is that we're now kind of in a new normal rather than in recovery. 

So, my staff has been taking a deep look at the statistics to see what that new normal is and where we should be applying our budget compared to where we did in the past, especially now that it's a slightly smaller budget. We taking a deeper dive. You can see here demand by format. 

Not surprisingly, the physical AV materials is down since 2019. That dark blue bar shows pre-COVID days and the dark orange bar is this last fiscal year. That's not a surprise to us because physical AV has really been going down even before COVID and in nowadays it's even hard sometimes to purchase it. We did see a little bit of a bump up in audio which I'll get to in a little bit. Digital resources are of course being used much heavier compared to fiscal year 2019 across the board. And I'm happy to let you know that books are still in a lot of demand and the usage has actually increased.