Observations and Ideas

Lorcan Dempsey’s post Evergreen and Pines refers to a Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) report Use of Georgia’s public libraries continues to rise in Internet Age and echoes one I made earlier here entitled Save the time of the reader. Briefly, all three deal with increases in the use of Georgia Public libraries generally and PINES particularly. But Dempsey makes a point of mentioning the consortial aspect of PINES and I have been thinking about this very point since my post a few weeks ago.

PINES, of course, runs on Evergreen and although Evergreen is running individual systems, the fact is that Evergreen is the most consortially-aware ILS—open source or proprietary—has resulted in some fascinating dynamics which these cited posts allude to.

In my post, Save the time of the reader, I reported on my attempt to measure the change year over year in three PINES use measures that could be compared before and after the switch from the legacy vendor to Evergreen. There are dramatic increases which I attributed largely to Ranganathan’s law it referred to because the reader’s time was saved as a result of better design of the interface, particularly of holds.

However, there is a measurement problem that brings out something more important that had implications I didn’t understand a month ago. Not all public libraries in Georgia are in PINES and the number changed over the period of my analysis. If we want apples to apples, as the saying goes, we should analytically remove the libraries that were added during the year so that we would have circs, holds, and such at the same set of libraries, that is, so that increases reported are not because of the addition of new libraries but rather because of easier to use software with better features. People, though, are just a bit complicated and that simple statistical manipulation would miss something key.

Georgia has a universal borrower card so if your local library is not in PINES, you can go to one that is and borrow from the PINES system. And what library users are doing is pretty clear, they are making the drive: they want access to the 2 million bibliographic entities and the over 9 million items owned by the libraries in PINES. As a result, the obvious statistical treatment itself would miss this dynamic aspect of people’s behavior. They don’t hold still and they react to changes in their environment.

To come full circle, I offer this speculation: that some of the growth in the number of PINES systems (44 to 49) since Evergreen went live in 2006, may be a result of this behavior.

I was graduated from library school in 1971 and I have seen various fashions about how best to do library service: big regionals or small local and intimate libraries. Back and forth. Back and forth. I believe the jury is now in. Library users are voting with their feet; they want the big, resource rich library.

Chris Jowaisis’s Texas Library Systems wiki has an ILS Discussion in which he offered an opinion I thought insightful about the Georgia experience: “(CJ opinion) political agreements are as impressive as the technology achievements of Evergreen.” I have quoted Chris’s observation often. Now, after seeing the experience in Georgia up close, I think that while we librarians and politicians care about the politics, the people who use libraries don’t. If you build the resource sharing consortium, they will come.

Bob Molyneux

Evergreen went live over the Labor Day weekend in 2006. How are the users of PINES adapting to the new ILS? The results of this preliminary analysis show rapid growth in use of PINES libraries.

We only have fragmentary data from before the change but the following table shows changes in selected measures of use of the PINES system. Year over year changes are the best way to calculate this kind of change because there are seasonal effects—for instance December is generally a slow month—and I have chosen to use percentages rather than raw numbers to make comparisons easier. In the table, the row “September 2007” lists the percent increases in the various raw figures of September 2007 over September 2006. Thus, September 2007 saw an increase in PINES libraries’ circulations of 10.1% over the September 2006 figures. Blanks in the table indicate there are no matching data to calculate percentage increases.

The table below has percent increases in circulations, total holds, and unique patrons requesting holds. Holds are those place by users in the library when some cataloged item is not available. Although Evergreen is used to measure the in-house use of both of cataloged and of uncataloged items, these types of circulations are not included here. The circs are by the standard definition—these are items going out the door.

We can see that circs have increased a bit over 10% for the four months we have matching data. Holds increased a good bit more and we have data for a longer period. The range of increases of these holds is from a bit under 30% increase to over 50%, depending on which month one examines. The change in holds is dramatic.

% increase in



% increase
% increase in
Unique Patrons



in Circulations
Total Holds
Requesting Holds


September, 2006
 
 
 


October, 2006
 
 
 


November, 2006
 
 
 


December, 2006
 
 
 


January, 2007
 
35.2
 


February, 2007
 
40.8
 


March, 2007
 
39.2
 


April, 2007
 
50.0
 


May, 2007
 
45.9
 


June, 2007
 
38.5
 


July, 2007
 
52.0
 


August, 2007
 
38.4
 


September, 2007
10.1
51.4
39.5


October, 2007
15.0
36.5
30.4


November, 2007
10.0
29.7
25.0


December, 2007
11.1
28.9
25.5

The right column shows the increase in unique patrons requesting holds. This column presents an interesting set of statistics because we see a striking increase in the number of patrons using this service.

So, the number of people requesting holds is going up, too. The number of holds per person (not shown) is up only slightly averaging fewer than 4.

Why these increases? I think we are seeing an “Evergreen Effect” which I would define as increases in library use brought on by saving the time of the reader. I don’t believe Ranganathan would be surprised by these data. Those readers are responding to a lower bar between them and materials they are seeking by using the PINES system and materials from its constituent libraries more. Evergreen was designed from the ground up with close consultation with librarians, Georgia Public Library Services staff, and library users. Modern notions about presentation of data were included from the beginning, not bolted on to an aging system. Hence, it is easy to use and intuitive.

These figures overstate the changes slightly. The number of systems at the start of PINES was 44 (including the State Library) and by December, 2007, there were 47. We did look at backing the data from the newer libraries out and that would decrease the raw numbers and percentages about 4%, we estimate.

But we ran into a problem and that was that people living in the service areas of libraries not served by PINES have been using PINES libraries in order to get access to the large, virtual library. There are currently 1.82 million titles in PINES libraries with 9.4 million copies. As I said: a large virtual library and one with many resources to share to library patrons with a PINES card. Any Georgia citizen can get one and we know that library users from non-PINES are availing themselves of these resources and 1.82 million titles is a powerful draw and, not inconceivably, a draw for some of the non-PINES libraries to join. In any case, if we took the effect of the newer libraries out, many of the users in the new systems were already users of PINES. There is an apples to oranges comparison but the currently unmeasurable effect is likely small—probably lower than 4% but we just can’t measure it. So, for December 2007 increase in circulations over December 2006 might be as low as 7%. The holds might also be about 4% lower, that is, perhaps 25% increase in total holds for December 2007 over December 2006. Teasing out a better number is going to be tricky.