I have been delving into Ireland's public library data for a recent client project. Publicly available data from the NOAC local authority performance indicator reports, together with Census data from the CSO, tell an interesting story.
In Ireland our public libraries are considered an important community asset, and investment in the public library service compares very strongly with our European neighbours. In contrast, in the UK, over 700 public libraries have been closed in the past 15 years. With local authority budgets stretched, UK library funding over the same period has almost halved. This contrast has not gone unnoticed in the UK, with one national newspaper equating Ireland’s literary success partly with this vibrant library network.
Reviewing the data, the negative impact of Covid on Ireland’s public libraries, with usage figures still below pre-Covid levels, is immediately evident. Several months of library closures in 2020 and 2021 led inevitably to a drop in visitor and membership numbers, although thanks to the pivot to digital, the impact on items issued was less dramatic.
Membership numbers also suffered during Covid, with 14.4% of the national population currently holding public library membership, down from an apparent peak of 19.1% in 2019. A challenge, then, for libraries to achieve the national target of 30% membership (although this ambitious goal seems to have been omitted from the most recent public library strategy).
Perhaps the 30% target was influenced by research, such as that from the Arts Council’s Arts Insight report, in which 34% of respondents said that they had visited a public library to read or borrow books in the past 12 months. But, even allowing that some library visitors may not be members, it is hard to reconcile the 14% and 34% figures. Even the country’s best performing public library service on this measure – Cavan – only reaches 21%.
This disparity reveals the recognised likelihood of social desirability bias in responses to any survey concerning reading and library use. This phenomenon means we should welcome the availability of robust NOAC data, and celebrate the introduction, in 2022, of a nationwide Library Management System, with the capacity to log all memberships and loans for all 30 library services nationwide.
Ireland’s public library services are obliged to report to NOAC on a number of measures, including membership as we have mentioned, but also the number of library visits, and the number of items issued. Working to maximise all three of these KPIs in a given year could be challenging for a public library service. My multivariate analysis suggests that, while they are all highly interdependent, and while items and visits are strongly correlated, it is library membership which seems to be the real driver of both. It looks like public libraries could usefully concentrate their resources on increasing membership.
Public library KPIs pose a further challenge: while per capita metrics take account of population size, they pay no heed to population characteristics. There is only a small body of literature comparing area-based socio-demographic and economic indicators with library service performance, but education, rather than economics, seems to be the key. My preliminary multivariate analysis of Ireland’s 30 library services with relevant indicators for each local authority area seems to bear this out – the proportion of people with a third level qualification in an area is much more strongly associated with membership than, for example, median household income.
If you are a public library service interested in the implications of this data for your work, or if you would like to know what internal Spydus data for your specific library service has to say, please get in touch! ann@annswift.ie
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