2009-12-31

Quick Hit: MHS stats for 2009


Jeremy reports on the MHS blog that 2009 was an impressive year for the Library Reader Services staff

All told we had over 1,450 researchers visit the library over the course of the year, for a total of 2,851 daily uses. We had over 740 first time visitors this year, a good indication that both our website and our public and educational programs are reaching out to new users. It is also a good indicator that people are still interested in using libraries.

In addition to the people that visited the library in person, our reference staff engaged in over 1,500 email correspondences with researchers seeking assistance, answered 62 posted letters, and fielded over 1,100 reference-related phone calls.

In servicing our researchers the staff made over 13,000 photocopies of MHS documents, and paged over 5,600 call slips. Because researchers can request multiple volumes and/or boxes from manuscript collections on a single call slip, it is difficult to gauge just how many individual items were retrieved and returned to the stacks, but I would wager it is a safe bet to say that it was well over 10,000 items.

If you're interested in further stats, like where all these researchers came from, click through to the Beehive for his full post.

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