Rick Anderson, Associate Director for Scholarly Resources & Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake CityJun 1, 2011
Everyone knows, or assumes, that use of academic libraries' physical collections—especially of printed books—is dropping. It's been a topic of discussion for years, and statistics bear out the conventional wisdom: the 2007-08 statistical report of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) indicates a 26% drop in initial circulations for its member libraries since 1991, while the National Center for Education Statistics' 2006 report on academic library data reports 144.1 million circulation transactions among academic libraries generally, down from 229 million reported by that agency in 1992—a decline of 37%.
Reading behind the numbers Standard circulation figures don't tell the whole story, however. Raw traffic and usage numbers do matter, but more important to the future of libraries are trends in the behavior of individual library users.
It's possible to tease out those trends from the available data but only if we control circulation figures for changes in the size of user populations. In other words, knowing how many books circulate in a given academic library is important, but since it's the behavior of individual patrons that will determine the future of libraries, it's much more meaningful to know how many books the average patron checks out.
At most academic institutions, enrollment tends to rise over time. If enrollment rises while circulation numbers remain the same, then the borrowing behavior of individuals is not actually remaining the same—it's declining.
With these issues in mind, the data for this study were collected as follows:
Initial circulation data were gathered for each ARL institution beginning in 1995 and ending in 2008 (the most recent data available as of this writing)
Full-time student enrollment numbers were gathered for the same years
For each year in the study period, initial circulations divided by full-time students yielded a per student circulation rate
For each ARL institution, the annual numbers describe a circulation rate trend for the period 1995-2008.
Table 1 (see below) presents three data points for a handful of ARL members (a complete table representing all ARL institutions is also available). The first data point, labeled "% Change (Raw)," indicates the change in initial circulation numbers between 1995 (or earliest available date, as indicated in parentheses following the library name) and 2008. Initial circulations are used because total circulation figures would include renewals, and the purpose of this particular study was to look only at changes in the average number of items checked out per student over time. The second data point, labeled "% Change (Rate)," indicates the degree to which the number of circulations per enrolled student has changed between 1995 (or earliest available date) and 2008.
The third data point indicates the difference (in percent) between the previous two numbers. So, for example, the University of Houston, TX, saw a 54% decline in initial circulations between 1995 and 2008; however, the rate of decline in initial circulations—the decline in the number of initial circulations per enrolled student—during that same period was 64%. In this case, the decrease in circulation rate is 19% steeper than the decrease in raw circulations.
Moving beyond circ What do these data tell us—and what do they fail to tell us?
While the percentage of change for each column is interesting, perhaps the more compelling data point is the difference between the raw number and the rate. In a few cases, there's hardly any difference: when adjusted for enrollment, the University of Cincinnati's circulation decline steepens from 63% to 67%, for example, and MIT's goes from 56% to 58%. However, in most cases the difference is significant, and in quite a few it's dramatic. The University of Alabama saw a decline of 31% in initial circulation transactions during the period studied; the adjusted rate of decline, however, is 50%.
Even greater differences can be seen between the raw and controlled circulation data reported by Columbia University (-16% vs. -50%), the University of Illinois at Chicago (-52% vs. -80%), and, most dramatic of all, the University of California, San Diego. There, shallow circulation growth and exploding enrollments have created perhaps the most misleading raw circulation figures of all: initial circulation transactions there have increased by 13% since 1995; however, the number of initial circulations per student has dropped during the same period by 35%. Controlling for enrollment reveals dramatic percentage differences between the change in raw circulation and the per student rate in quite a few cases: UCLA (233%); UC-San Diego (369%); Oklahoma (414%); Pennsylvania (600%); and, most spectacular of all, Johns Hopkins (617%). Not all of these percentage differences represent huge disparities in real numbers, of course—the 600% difference at the University of Pennsylvania is between a 1% increase and a 5% decrease over the period examined—but where large differences exist between apparent and actual circulation trends, they illustrate a real problem with at least one of our traditional measures of library use.
Clues to change This discussion raises a question, though: Why does per student rate matter more than raw circulation figures? One could argue that circulation is circulation and what keeps a store in business is the amount of merchandise sold, not the number of customers doing the buying. The problem with this view is that it ignores the central importance of individual behavior to the future of libraries. If the average user in 2008 checked out 80% fewer books than the average student in 1995, then there is an important message in that fact for libraries. If enrollment drops, students won't magically start checking out more books.
Even the specific, individual numbers themselves are not accurate representations of the actual circulation behavior of any typical student: the circulation figures reflect the behavior of faculty members and (in many cases) members of the general public as well, which means that they are artificially high as far as student behavior is concerned. What matters to the future of each library is not so much whether the "typical" student checks out 55 or 58 books per semester but whether the number of items checked out is growing or shrinking and how quickly. What this study seeks to measure for each institution isn't the exact amount of per student circulation at each institution in any given year but rather the rate of change over time in the number of average per student circulations—in other words, the shape of the curve rather than the exact height of the curve.
It's also important not to misunderstand the significance of circulation numbers. A library that circulates fewer books isn't necessarily doing anything "wrong," nor is it necessarily serving fewer patrons or offering its patrons less service. Actually, a library that moves large amounts of its collection online is likely to see drastically fewer physical circulations even as it fosters greater use of the collection overall by making it available more easily, remotely, and around the clock. Exposing the real extent of circulation declines in ARL members isn't just to sound an alarm about decreasing use of print collections but rather to expose more fully the shape of changes in patron behavior. Those changes have generally been more radical (in many cases dramatically so) than an examination of the raw circulation figures alone can reveal.
The data in Table 1 strongly suggest that the trend away from print books is even more pronounced than we've often understood or assumed. But for each individual library, the trends in the world at large matter less than the trend in that institution. These data, which are general and leave many, many other variables unexamined, should prompt a broader and more rigorous study at each individual library.
Author Information
Rick Anderson (rick.anderson@utah.edu) is Associate Director for Scholarly Resources & Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Reader Comments (18)
Circulation of books is only one part of the paradigm. Also to be considered is the possibility that students are using books in the library but not checking them out.
Posted by Joanne Cooper on June 2, 2011 06:43:47PM
Having lived this trend, this would be why we are engaged now in a
massive review of our print collections to determine just what we do need
to keep on campus. And why we are shifting to more PDA type
acquisitions going forward.
I must note that the important trend that we are tracking closely, and that
is steadily increasing, is usage of the electronic resources.
Martha Hruska AUL Collection Services, UC San Diego
Posted by Martha Hruska on June 2, 2011 10:10:00PM
Perhaps most interesting is why there are notable differences and even exceptions, such as Duke.
Posted by James Pakala on June 2, 2011 11:07:47PM
It would be beneficial if this study were also correlated with what resources students are required to use as part of their research. If the trend is toward using e-books vs. print that's one thing. If the trend is toward lesser or no use of books in general, then higher education needs to seriously examine the quality of their student's research.
Posted by Mark Reynolds on June 3, 2011 08:42:35AM
Presumably changes in the rate at which libraries acquire new
print monographs would also be a factor in changing
circulation rates. The decline in circulations might in part
reflect changes in collection practice that are already at
work in libraries, and not just changes in students' behavior.
Posted by Stephen Hearn on June 3, 2011 01:03:49PM
One of my main goals in publishing this study was to reveal generalized
trends, but another was to prompt more detailed examinations of local
patterns among individual libraries. Jim, you raise a very interesting issue --
why is it that a few libraries are such stark outliers in their circulation
patterns? I'm considering a follow-up article that might look at two or three
libraries with very different patterns and see if it's possible to establish the
factors that contribute to those differences.
Joanne, you mention the possibility that greater in-house use might be
driving down circulation statistics. That sounds highly unlikely to me and I
can tell you that such is not the case at my own institution; reshelving
statistics are falling at a slightly steeper rate than circulation is. But other
libraries may be seeing very different usage dynamics, so I can only reiterate
that one goal of this study is to prompt local examination. If you see your
circulation falling while in-house usage is rising, that would be a very
interesting result and probably worth reporting on!
Posted by Rick Anderson on June 6, 2011 11:48:54AM
This is all fine and well, but it does not take place in a vacuum. During this same time period, serials prices increased substantially, consuming an ever larger proportion of acquisitions budgets. Note also that serials, in many libraries, do not circulate or circulate for very limited periods, and are often not counted, or counted as 'reserves'.
Unit costs for books also increased during this time, resulting in fewer volumes available for the same dollar amount expended. Add to this static or declining total dollar amounts, with regular cancellations of both subscriptions and monograph purchases, and you demonstrate only that if you destroy it, they will leave.
If the collection is not growing adequately to keep up with current availability, if it is getting stale, if I go shopping for cat litter and cereal and all I can find is toilet paper and ketchup, I will most certainly not be going home with much, will I?
Oh, and god forbid we would pay attention to faculty use patterns, they are the ones that are here for decades. It is like ignoring your base power load and only planning and organizing your utility service for peaks and troughs.
Back to the drawing board....
Posted by dennis trombatore on June 7, 2011 11:27:54AM
The data needs analysis in two areas:
Library and book usage varies greatly by discipline. To understand the effect of increased enrollment on the library you need to know if enrollment is increasing across all programs, or primarily n library-dependent programs like the humanities, or in primarily in disciplines that are much less library-dependent: physical and life sciences, engineering, etc. The sciences are journal-dependent so increased enrollment in those fields will be unlikely to do much to increase use of either the library space or its book collection.
The data cannot be understood without also looking at data on use of the physical library space and the use of computers within the space. In 1995, to the extent students had computers they had desktop machines, so the books would need to travel to their desks. In 2008 portable machines have taken hold, so the computers are traveling to where the books are.
Posted by Dean Blobaum on June 8, 2011 11:44:36AM
At my institution (small private ca. 1,000 student College),
we've noted this decrease in book circulation too (notably,
with no apparent preference toward eBooks, which seem to be
generally ignored or avoided). At the same time we've
noticed a general increase in database use. My suspicion is
that more "Google-ish" searching (with indexed full-text)
pushes students toward these sorts of resources, where our
online catalog only searches title, author, keyword, etc.
Can you imagine searching the web based only on <h1> or
<meta> tags?
Because of this, we've started encouraging students to use
tools like Google Books (which IS fully indexed) as
discovery tools.
I don't think that students have any aversion to the print
format. In fact, I'd say most prefer it to electronic
formats, esp. for reading. However, Searching the content of
our print collection doesn't utilize a paradigm that most
students are familiar with. Why search keywords when I could
search full-text?
Posted by Jack Weinbender on June 9, 2011 09:16:15AM
What the data also show is that there are very likely serious data quality and consistency problems. It seems unlikely that student behavior varies so drastically across institutions, especially when looking at similar institutions. (There are many possible explanations for the data problems.) This problem can also be seen when looking at this data for a single institution over a period of years, i.e., unlikely wild fluctuations up and down from year to year. It would be interesting to normalize somehow to correct for the problems (challenging) or to pick a set of institutions that looked like it had fewer of these data problems to see if a more predictive trend could be observed.
Posted by Kristin Antelman on June 10, 2011 03:46:47PM
This is a good study. Per student circulations provide a much more valuable measure of use. However, I wish the author would indicate if the statistics used include all print materials or only books. For my dissertation I examined this question at a university and community college and found that while print periodical circulations showed dramatic decreases, monograph circulations showed only slight declines, especially for infrequently used titles. There was some variation in these trends for different user types. Given the current ready availability of print journal materials this would seem to imply that users are likely to switch to digital formats only when the content is duplicated.
Posted by Dan Haley on June 13, 2011 02:33:39PM
Dennis's and Dean's comments prompt me to reiterate an important (but
apparently very easily overlooked) point from my article: the circulation data I
report are general. Obviously, they don't "take place in a vacuum" (though the
same can be said about the results of any study), and obviously the aggregate
data will tend to hide more specific local trends. That's why I tried to make
clear my hope that individual libraries will be prompted by the _general_
trends indicated by the ARL data to investigate _local_ trends in their own
institutions. As I also pointed out in my piece, print circulation is by no means
a complete indicator of library service trends. However, to the degree that we
continue investing significant amounts of money and person-power in the
acquisition and management of print materials, print circulation trends
continue to matter, and for that reason it seems to me that it's worth
understanding them better.
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Data is important but proper interpretation of them is even more important.
The only camera shop in a remote fishing village of 10 has 10 cameras with
one-year life span to sell. The owner sells 9 of them. The following year the
village population doubles. Based on the previous year's sales, the shop
owner orders only 8 cameras to restock. The owner sells all the cameras. So
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Conclusions:
1. People don't take pictures anymore.
2. Disposable cameras aren't popular anymore.
3. Maybe the owner should order more cameras.
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