It’s been a while since I’ve posted–blog posting has been falling to the bottom of my list and then falling right off the list as I’ve been occupied with other projects and commitments.  Hopefully, this will be the start of more regular posts.

A few weeks ago, I attended the statewide meeting of youth services consultants, and was fascinated to hear our state’s Public Library Data and Finance Consultant, Jamie McCanless talking about the data, and the stories the data had to tell were pretty fascinating.

We all have seen the trends -circulation tends to be going down statewide.  Jamie broke out the statewide data, however, and found that in rural areas, the change in circulation is less drastic, and in fact, it went up in 44 rural libraries (compared to going up in zero of the 16 city libraries).  And children’s materials circulation went up in 76 rural libraries.  In fact, all across the state, the children’s materials as a percentage of total circulation is steadily rising.  So all that time and energy you are putting into collecting, promoting, displaying, and encouraging children’s materials?  It’s paying off.

Sometime in December, look for another blog post about data–we’ll try to drill down in the same way for MORE libraries.