2006 Annual Report for NCPL

The report is available here. We definitely made our goal for 2006, but there were some parts of the library (books and the like) that were not used as much as I had hoped. It is definitely difficult to purchase materials with such a diverse amount of titles available. This also doesn't take into consideration the vast amount of information that is quickly available on the Internet and the fact that many of the 13,000 people who used the public computers probably found their information online versus what we have in hard copy.

(side note) We just received a post card from a staff member in Florida. She went to use the computers at the library there (town is about 20,000+) and their library only has three public access computers compared to the 18 that we have for our patrons. (Did you know that we also have laptops available to you on request and that you can use them anywhere in the library with our wireless network?)

DO REMEMBER that patron requests are ALWAYS put at the top of the list and 99% of those requests are purchased. If a title is really obscure and/or uber expensive, we'll consider it, but chances are we'll get it for you through Inter-Library loan (still free of charge to our patrons).

Some changes really stood out, like the decrease for the children's department. Upon investigation we also found that in 2006 we stopped double checking in items (double checking in was a good check for us, but it also skewed our statistics). So we stopped doing that and it shows in our stats.

Financially we are in better shape than many libraries our size (and even a few larger ones). Our budget is fully funded for 2007 and we'll just have to "suck-it-up" in 2008 when the Circuit Breaker kicks in and slaughters budgets for libraries, municipalities and schools.

Gross usage of the library was counted at 190,936 (all book circulation, dvds, patron attendance at programs etc.) compared to 60,000 when we were at the old building. It's nice to see that the community is taking good advantage of the resources that we provide.