How to increase library visits
What do ice cream, murder, Kevin Costner, My School and the LGPRF have in common? They are all part of the story of the most interesting library statistic I have seen this year. A statistic that points to what you can do to increase the number of people who visit your public library. And it’s not a surprise!
Let’s start with the LGPRF, which is an abbreviation for the Local Government Performance Reporting Framework. (Is it just me or did 50% of you just consider clicking out of this post?) For non-Victorians you can think of this as a bit like the My School website for Councils. Since 2014 Local Government Victoria has established a set of indicators and published them annually on the Know Your Council website so residents can compare the performance of their Council against all the others. Basically, it’s the league tables for rubbish collection, food handling, dog catchers and libraries.
In principle, like My School, this is not a bad idea. However, the problem with publishing data is that you can’t be sure how people will use it. And as recently as four months ago I gave a presentation where the Council CEO pulled up Know Your Council on his laptop to challenge an assertion I had made about the relatively good performance of his library. (I’m not sure why he wanted to denigrate his library in front of Councillors, but that’s his right). The difference in opinion arose because he was interpreting the published statistic (LB3 Cost of library service per visit) to mean something it didn’t.
Now that problem won’t arise again because the 2019-20 version of the LGPRF has (wisely) removed that somewhat misleading indicator, and replaced it with LB5 Cost of library service per population. I like this statistic – it’s Indicator #1 on my Library Scorecard (https://www.analibraryse.com/blog/library-scorecard). It says this is what it costs to run the library for every person who lives in the LGA (local government area).
Yet I sense this indicator will cause even more trouble than the last one. Firstly, because it deliberately excludes at least 30% of the cost of running a library, including – wait for this – the cost of providing the books. Now call me crazy, but I thought books were pretty fundamental to offering a library service and they probably should be IN the equation. Secondly, in the LGPRF Manual when it talks about use of this data and the intended community outcome it says:
“Assess the degree to which Council services are cost-efficient. Lower costs suggest greater commitment towards cost-efficient library services.”
Again, in principle true, and I am a big fan of operational efficiency. But that wording might encourage Council managers to drive for cost-efficiency in their library services by cutting costs in ways that have unintended consequences. Which is why I think you want to be somewhere around the upper middle of the cost per capita table – not so high that you’re accused of overservicing, and not so low that the community is getting a stripped down service. So I looked at what other statistical indicators are related to cost per capita, and discovered that, on average and per capita …
The more you spend on your library the more people visit.
You can see it in the following chart which plots library visits per capita against total library funding per capita for Victorian libraries in 2018-19. The libraries that have less than 4 visits per capita tend to have lower funding levels (below $40 per population), and those around the 6 to 8 visits per capita have higher funding levels ($40 to $55). This is not about library size or location. There are very large and very small and metro and regional libraries in both groups. But if you can imagine drawing a line through these dots (and putting aside the outliers) it would run from bottom left to top right – that is, higher spend is associated with more visits.
Statistically, we call this correlation. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one thing causes the other (ice cream sales and murder rates are correlated but it’s not because violent criminals have a hankering for Barney Bananas – it’s because both seem to increase in hotter weather). It simply means that the more two things are correlated the more likely it is that they increase or decrease at the same rate.
Using the PLV data from its 2018-19 statistical survey I looked for correlations between library visits and a range of other library indicators, and three things stand out as being strongly correlated with the number of library visits per capita (bearing in mind that correlation goes between -1 and 1, with a value of 1 meaning perfectly aligned movement up or down). That is, the number of library visits is associated with:
Active library borrowers as a % of the population
Total library funding per capita
Staff EFT per capita.
In some ways this makes perfect sense. The more people who are borrowing the more visitors there will be to the library ... AND … The more you spend on your library, the more staff you have to engage with customers, the more inviting and interesting the space, the more likely it is that people will visit.
This strong correlation doesn’t tell us is if it’s the volume of funding or the number of staff per capita or both which are really influential, and that’s something we can look into further. But it strongly suggests that public libraries have a touch of the “If you build it, he will come” about them (Field of Dreams, 1989). And it does suggest that driving down costs in the name of cost-efficiency is likely to result in reduced visitation, which in turn will make the library less efficient.
As governments, businesses and communities have discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic, our economy and society are very finely tuned, and changes can lead to unexpected outcomes. It might be that the best way to increase the return on investment in public libraries is not to cut costs but to increase the number of people who visit and use the library.