In-person visits to the Idea Exchange plunged to less than a quarter of their pre-pandemic levels in 2021, but if you ask chief executive officer Helen Kelly if the lack of people browsing library shelves has been bad for business, she’ll show you numbers that demonstrate the opposite.
Some of the changes the library has made to accommodate the shift to curb-side and online service delivery have proven so promising, they're likely to stick around.
It's also provided staff with the best insight they’ve ever had into what types of material borrowers want to check out, Kelly said.
And it will help inform how the Idea Exchange spends its $631,050 budget for new materials on everything from physical books and DVDs to online resources like Ancestry.com, and "unusual stuff to borrow," including park passes and garden tools.
Digital resources represent one of the fastest-growing areas within the Cambridge library's annual spend on new resources.
Over the past six years, the Idea Exchange's overall materials budget has increased by eight per cent, while the library’s spend on digital materials, including e-books, audio books, and online databases such as Ancestry.com has grown by 11 per cent to meet demand, Kelly said.
Physical books aren't about to disappear from library shelves anytime soon, but interest in e-material is growing.
Members checked out more than 200,000 e-books, e-magazines, and audio books through the libraries' Overdrive and Hoopla sites in 2021.
And while children's DVDs remain as popular as ever, Kelly says other types of physical media are quickly giving way to streaming services offered through the library.
In 2021, the Idea Exchange logged more than 1.1 million views of its online resources, including online articles through Press Reader and streaming movies and documentaries through Kanopy, which offers more than 30,000 movies and documentaries.
Looking at the same data last summer, Kelly said Cambridge borrowers accessed over 260,000 articles through Pressreader in 2020 and checked out close to 190,000 e-books and e-magazines, more than twice the amount checked out in 2019.
“It really does help you see that that’s an area where things are growing,” Kelly says. “As we’ve rolled out more of the online products we’ve seen more uptake in them.”
In contrast to the digital growth, in-person visits to the library fell to less than half while shutdowns and capacity restrictions were in place.
In 2019 there were 829,741 visits to Idea Exchange locations but that fell to 336,181 in 2020.
It got even quieter at local libraries in 2021 when only 215,000 members walked through the doors of an Idea Exchange.
But with things looking up and restrictions set to loosen soon, the city expects to see as many as 400,000 in-person visits to its libraries 2022.
Electronic check-ins, on the other hand, reached 793,943 in 2019 and grew to 876,959 in 2020.
In-person program attendance shrank from 102,266 in 2019 to 79,275 in 2020 and 50,000 in 2021 as everything shifted to online.
And curbside pick up changed the way the libraries operate.
Kelly said since everybody using the library has to put things on hold, they were no longer putting only the current best seller on hold.
“This is a really great way of seeing where the demand is in real time,” Kelly said. “Instead of coming in and browsing and picking their own materials, they're asking us to pick it for them.”
In 2021, members placed more than 180,000 items on hold, representing a 67 per cent increase over pre-pandemic 2019.
It gives library staff a good indication of what areas of the collection need to be improved.
The move online also led library staff to come up with some creative ways to continue to share the resources they had instead of letting it languish on the shelf.
One example of how that happened is in the way staff repurposed the 35 iPads the Idea Exchange would typically use for in-house children's programs.
When in-person library programs stopped, IT staff installed Overdrive, Hoopla and Kanopy apps on all the iPads and allowed members to check them out on three week loans.
“We started doing that one year ago and we’ve had over 200 checkouts of our iPads to go,” Kelly said. “It’s been a great way to bring technology to people who need it during the pandemic.”
Through that effort, Coding for Kids became one of the library’s most popular online programs because it gave kids everything they needed at home.
The Idea Exchange also began bundling resources to support youth and children in themed kits like Read the Rainbow for emerging readers, and the PlaySmart collection.
Each kit is sent home with a survey for users so they can tell library staff what worked and what didn’t.
One area of interest Kelly is excited to see grow through this year's procurement process is their unusual stuff collection.
It includes everything from musical instruments and DIY animation kits, to binoculars for bird watchers and one-day Ontario Parks and Grand River Conservation Area passes for seven day loans.
A full list of unusual stuff to borrow can be found on the Idea Exchange website.
