Another Twelve Months of Library Circulation Data
Supports Long-Overdue Changes in Branch Staffing
Posted July 31, 2006; correction inserted August 1, 2006
A ranking of the June 2006 circulation
totals that were released earlier this month shows the same uneven
distribution of the library system's workload that they always show.
Now that
another twelve months of ranked circulation data has accumulated
without the complicating effects of new branches being opened (or older or
abandoned branches being reopened in larger spaces), it's clearer than ever
before that changes in staffing allocations are way overdue.
Current staffing allocations were set many years ago during the period when
the library trustees, instead of the library director advised by his
administrators, dictated the library's organizational structure and
day-to-day operations, including staffing allocations. With the
board now in its proper policy-making role and a new library director on
board for over a year now, it's difficult to understand what obstacles
are preventing the effort to align staffing allocations with current
workload patterns.
True, there are many ways to measure the work being done at the various
work sites throughout the library system, but the most obvious
empirical measure - the lending and reshelving of library materials - is
currently almost irrelevant to the number of staff allocated to the
library's 33 circulating libraries. (How many staff should be added to or
subtracted from current allocations to allow for planning and/or
conducting library programs is a separate issue, and one much more
difficult to quantify.)
Nobody imagines that circulation should be the only factor determining
how many employees are allocated to a particular branch. Some communities
served by some libraries seem to use them for virtually everything but
borrowing materials from. On the other hand, it seems crazy and
irresponsible to ignore circulation as a major staff-determining factor.
How much weight should be given to circulation - versus other circulation-related
factors such as the number of incoming and outgoing Holds, say, or the
number of new cardholders registered - is a complex, debatable issue.
The problem is that no one has been debating it.
Given the political reality that no one is likely to succeed in closing
any branch to free up staff to work elsewhere, the question remains of
which branches deserve more staff (or less staff) because of the volume
or proportion of lending and reshelving they handle day in, day out, and
year in, year out.
An examination of the monthly circ totals, percentages, and rankings for
the past twelve months (see chart) and
circ totals, percentages, and rankings for the twelve-month period before
that, shows far more stability than volatility in terms of which branches
are shouldering the bulk of the library system's lending activity -
and which branches are doing the least lending and reshelving of library
materials:
- Over half (13) of the rankings haven't changed in the past three
consecutive months.
- Over two-thirds of those ranking-stablilized facilities haven't
changed their rankings in the past four consecutive months.
- Of the ranking-stabilized facilities, over three-fourths of them are
among the busiest twelve libraries. That's a third of all the branches
that show a marked persistence in the proportion of the library system's
workload that they handle, month in and month out, year in and year out.
Some specific observations that should have implications for branch staffing:
- The twelve busiest branches - or approximately one-third of them -
account for slightly more than 80% of the library system's total circulation.
Do 80% of the library system's public service employees work at these
twelve branches?
- Only two branches (Roswell and Ocee) handle more than 10% of the
library system's total circulation.
- Only 8 facilities handle more than 5% of the library system's total
circulation. Only 17 facilities (approximately half of them) circulate at
least 1% of the materials borrowed from the library system every month.
- Roswell, designated as a "Temporary Regional Library" before two
Regionals were built at the north end of the county, consistently
out-cirulates those two - and all other - purpose-built Regionals.
- Northeast, the busiest branch a year ago, has been the third-busiest
for every month of the past twelve months.
- The busiest Area Library, Alpharetta, consistently out-circulates
the largest library (Central), but its staffing doesn't come close to
approximating the staffing of the Central's public service departments.
[Webmaster's Note: An alert reader has pointed
out that, for the past twelve months, Central has outcirculated Alpharetta,
not the other way around. It was the twelve-month period between July 2004
and June 2005 that Alpharetta outcirculated Central.]
Alpharetta also out-circulates three better-staffed Regional Libraries
(Sandy Springs, Southwest, and South Fulton) - but has fewer staff than
any of them. In fact, Alpharetta's circulaiton is comparable to (and has often
exceeded) Central's, despite its smaller size and smaller staff.
- All the Area Libraries except East Point consistently out-circulate
the two Regional Libraries (Southwest and South Fulton) on the south end
of the county, despite the reported and/or projected growth in that area.
- The rankings of the busiest and the least busy Area Libraries doesn't
vary: Alpharetta is always the busiest, and East Point is always the least
busy. (Yet East Point is the only Area Library open on Sundays. Go figure.)
One of the main reasons for the persisting inequities and inefficiencies
in branch staffing is the former board's long-obsolete division of AFPL
facilities into only four groups. The actual workload patterns indicate
that at least five - and probably six - tiers are needed to guide staff
allocations, materials budgets, any other resource that should at least
partly reflect circulation differentials.
Here are two models, either of which that would result in a lot more humane and more
efficient deployment of library personnel than the status quo, along with
the results of using each model given the currently prevailing figures:
| Staffing Based on Raw Circulation Totals |
Staffing Based on % of Total Circ Handled |
Type A Branches
handling 20,000 or more circs per month
Roswell
Ocee
Northeast
Central
|
Type I Branches
handling 10% or more of AFPL's total circ
Roswell
Ocee
|
Type B Branches
handling 10,000 to 20,000 circs per month
Alpharetta
Sandy Springs
Buckhead
Ponce de Leon
Northside
|
Type II Branches
handling 5%-10% of AFPL's total circ
Northeast
Central
Alpharetta
Sandy Springs
Buckhead
|
Type C Branches
handling 5,000-10,000 circs per month
Southwest
South Fulton
East Point
|
Type III Branches
handling 2% to 5% of AFPL's total circ
Northside
Southwest
South Fulton
East Point
|
Type D Branches
handling 2,000-5,000 circs per month
Fairburn
Stewart-Lakewood
Peachtree
East Atlanta
Kirkwood
College Park
West End
|
Type IV Branches
handling 1% to 2% of AFPL's total circ
Fairburn
Stewart-Lakewood
Peachtree
East Atlanta
Kirkwood
College Park
|
Type E Branches
handling 1,000-2,000 circs per month
Washington Park
Cleveland Avenue
Mechanicsville
Hapeville
Adams Park
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Adamsville/Collier Heights
Bankhead Courts
Georgia-Hill
Bowen Homes
|
Type V Branches
handling 0.5% to 1% of AFPL's total circ
West End
Washington Park
Cleveland Avenue
Mechanicsville
Hapeville
Adams Park
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Adamsville/Collier Heights
Bankhead Courts
Georgia-Hill
|
Type F Branches
handling less than 1,000 circs per month
Dogwood
Carver Homes
Perry Homes
Thomasville Heights
|
Type 6 Branches
handling less than 0.5% of AFPL's total circ
Bowen Homes
Dogwood
Carver Homes
Perry Homes
Thomasville Heights
|
Important to the effectiveness of either model would be the principle of
assigning different numbers of staff to different branches within its
type wherever there is a significant circulation differential. (For example,
Northeast, which currently handles 9.8% of the total circulation, should
be allocated more staff than Ponce, which handles only 5%. Or Northside,
which handles 4.7% of the total circulation, should be given more staff
than East Point, which handles 2.3%.)
Whatever new staffing/workload handling model is adopted, something needs
to change - and it's probably not going to be "more staff for everybody."
It's also important to be sure that one outmoded model for grouping
libraries isn't replaced semi-permanently by another one. An empirically-based
grouping of branches should
- be revisited periodically (both to account for changes in
library use patterns and to minimize the frequency of staff reassignments).
- spell out clearly how a branch would qualify for more (or fewer) staff
by being reassigned to a different branch group (ideally, by crossing one
or more circulation-based thresholds).
- take into account unusual circumstances (for example, a just-opened
branch or a change in managers can temporarily drive circulation upwards -
or, in a nearby branch, downwards).
Also, whatever staff-allocating formulas is used, administrators need to
get more creative about addressing temporary staff shortages, as
they are always happening somewhere in such a large system.
AFPL administrators are paid their handsome salaries partly because they
are responsible for scrutinizing workload data and making staffing changes
as needed - whatever the prevailing resource levels happen to be. We don't
understand the prolonged delay in making the some of the most obviously-needed
staffing changes at AFPL.
We certainly hope that administrators' preoccupation with the
also-long-awaited Facilities Master Plan - which presumably focuses on
justifications for the construction of new libraries for underserved parts
of Fulton County - won't further delay staffing reallocations for
existing AFPL facilities.
Staff at AFPL's busiest facilities shouldn't be forced to endure yet another
year of the unnecessary staffing inequities that seriously and chronically
hamper their ability to do their work.
Readers are invited to
send us your own observations about persistent patterns you've noticed in
AFPL's circulation statistics, so your observations can be posted (with or
without your name) to the website.
Dept. of Do-able Ideas
Supporting "The Shared Life of the Mind"
Posted July 2, 2006
Several universities around the country have adopted the idea of welcoming
incoming freshmen by having them meet in small groups with different
faculty members to discuss faculty-recommended books the students
read during the summer after graduating from high school.
Here's how one of the participating professors describes the program as
it's been adopted by the University of Texas at Austin:
"[UT/Austin's
summer reading/book-discussion program] tells students at
the beginning of their university careers that learning begins in pleasure
and curiosity....The program has been so successful because...the students
feel it’s a special, and very personal, effort by the big UT to welcome
them, while for the faculty it’s a great way to get a glimpse of the
incoming class without grading and other routines. It sets a nice tone for
the university being about the shared life of the mind.”
Here's
the list of the 30 titles chosen this year at UT/Austin, for those AFPL
selectors who'd like to check their collections to see which missing ones
they'd like to order.
This idea reminds us of the potential good will that public libraries
could generate by offering some sort of "summer reading program for adults."
Even without arranging meetings - or, even better, perhaps, a blog - for
readers and recommenders to discuss the chosen titles, why don't more
public libraries, including AFPL, routinely offer, on the library system's
website, a list of recommended summer reading for adults?
Surely there's a handful of library workers who are avid readers themselves
who would be willing to create such a list. The most useful list, of course,
would be wide-ranging in the types of titles recommended, and each title
would be accompanied by an explanation of why it's being recommended, and
who it is that's doing the recommending.
It seems to us that providing such a list would:
- fill the need for guidance and enthusiastic advice that many (adult)
readers, at times, feel;
- remind everyone visiting the library's website that among the people
on the library's staff are individuals who (also) enjoy reading;
- acknowledge that the library is willing to expend some effort at
encourage reading among adults as well as among kids and teenagers.
Wouldn't this be A Good Thing? And would it be So Difficult?
Come to think of it, perhaps this sort of effort shouldn't be limited to summer reading:
why not an ongoing - and archived - list of titles (older
faves as well as current titles) recommended for adults by library staff
and/or by other library users?
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