Marching On!

Today is the first day of March and the temperature outside is a balmy 31 degrees with sleet falling from the sky.  It is a great day for a hot drink and reading some of the new fiction titles in our library. But first some work! I decided to run some reports to see if the genrefication project is still creating an upward trend in book circulation.

Because it is such a gray day, let me spread some sunshine.

	11/18/2013-3/1/2014	11/18/2014-3/1/15	+/-  change
Fiction	2072	2334	+262
NonFiction	1192	1971	+779
Total Checkouts (minus Everybody)	3819	4958	+1139

Looking more closely to the Nonfiction section, here is a breakdown by Dewey 100's.

Dewey 100’s	11/18/13-3/1/14	11/18/14-3/1/15	+/- change
000-099	15	37	+22
100-199	13	10	-3
200-299	23	10	-13
300-399	116	165	+49
400-499	16	10	-6
500-599	348	418	+70
600-699	300	364	+64
700-799	238	451	+213
800-899	61	172	+111
900-999	62	334	+272

Looking even closer still, there are some MAJOR upward trends in the 700-999 Dewey classifications.  But why?  I wish I could get more detailed data.  I wonder if, when we are able to set location fields for all of the titles, we will be able to get data detailed to the location field.  I hope so because I think that will help define the checkout trends.

So at this point, I can only hypothesize.  In the 700's, perhaps this is due to the weeding of unappealing titles and greater visibility of the "What Can I Make?" section.  The books were relocated to vertical bookcases. Vertical shelves seem to attract more visitors but I am not sure why. Moving on to the 800's, I am even more baffled.  I know that I am not seeing poetry books flying off the shelves.  My joke books are constantly checked out so that accounts for some of the increase.  But I don't have an abundance of joke books.  But, perhaps, over a period of months of the shelf being continuously bare, the joke books are more of a factor than I realize.  The 900's are the Dewey grouping that I feel most confident hypothesizing about.  I think this is attributed to the biographies being moved into the subject areas.  I have seen more sports biographies, technology biographies, military biographies and biographies of performing artists checked out than ever.  This makes me want to take a harder look at the "Who Is?" category to see if more can be recategorized (assuming my hypothesis is true).  There has also been an upward trend in the "Where In The U.S.A Is" and "American History" collections.

I think it may be time for some discussions with the library office, and maybe Follett, about teasing out the data and getting the location fields in place.