Thanks for the awesome number crunching. There's a lot of interesting info here. I wish my library were so well stocked with gn's.

Hello Nathan! Glad to be of help. I always find it interesting, so I'm glad to find other folks do too.

Hopefully this can be used to argue for your local library beefing up its graphic novel collection! After all, if they beat Twilight...

Hi Robin,

This is fascinating, but I'm curious about the metrics involved. When you say "volume," you mean the various volumes of a particular series (so volume 1, volume 2, volume 3 and so on), correct? If so, do these stats track how many copies of each title/volume you have? In other words, are all these stats showing only one copy circulating? Or do you have, say, 10 copies of Case Closed Volume 1 circulating at the same time? I'm not clear on this point.

I'm also curious what you think about the following article that ran on the Library Journal some years ago (The Circulation Trap, www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA237600.html). I thought there was some interesting food for thought.

Questions aside, though, it's really neat to see this so thanks again for sharing!

Hello Von Allan,

For me, volumes mean literally the number of volumes I have per series. Part of the reason I clarified that we may have a few duplicate volumes is that there are a small number of series where the volume number listed is higher than the total number of volumes published. This is true, for example, with After School Nightmare: we ended up with an extra copy of volume 1, so I decided to add it given how much the series went out. That makes the total number of volumes potentially circulating eleven, even though the series only has 10 volumes officially.

The majority of the series we own, though (I'd say 98%) do not have any duplicate volumes, and if anything have volumes missing from the total run. So, for these statistics, most often I mean volumes in the sense of total volumes own and in the sense of the series run (so, Ranma 1/2 has 36 volumes total, and we have 36 volumes, numbers 1-36, in our collection.) Does that clarify what I mean?

As per the Circulation Trap, I certainly understand many of their points. Circulation numbers are always tough -- administrators and town government rely on them as the ultimate marker of a library's worth, and they are certainly an easy quote if you can rattle off how many items have circulated per year, or how much circulation has improved. As with any statistics, they can be easily manipulated as well as leave aside factors that should be considered. One thing that almost always gets left out of circulation numbers is how often certain items are read in the building itself (and thus never checked out.) Some libraries track this for particular items (magazines and newspapers), but while I know for a fact comics and graphic novels and novels get read every day in my Teen Room, I rarely get a chance to actually register those "in-house" circulations within our computer system.

That article's main point is that we need to be careful about what we count, and consider the importance of each number. As someone who works with teens, I know that having four teens attend a program is about on par with having 15 children attend a children's program due to how much harder it is to get teens to show up for a library program. That's definitely a case where the numbers don't mean as much as the quality of the program and the patrons it reaches.

Those of us who work with graphic novels know that all graphic novels circulate more than prose novels for one simple reason: they're faster to read. A patron may walk out with 12 graphic novels and come back three days later for 15 more, but that is a lot less true of patrons checking out a pile of novels. This doesn't make graphic novel circulation numbers insignificant, it just means you have to remember what you're talking about. For example, this past year was the first time that my graphic novel circulation numbers surpassed the circulation for my DVD collection (I'm one of the few teen librarians that has my own DVD collection.) DVDs almost always circulate more than any other item in a library because of both popularity and quick turn around time, so the fact that my graphic novels moved out ahead was significant. I just have to make sure that when I present that fact, I give it the context it needs to make sense.

Thank you. This is precisely the sort of information I was hoping to find. (And thanks for the context, too: the same thought occurred to me about the speed-of-reading factor.

Hi Robin--

Thank you for your in depth number crunching. I was glad that you mentioned, albeit in your response to a comment, the fact that so many GNs get read at the library and never get checked out. It's frustrating that there isn't an easy way to also count these in our circ stats. We have lots of teens who are unable to check anything out because they have a problem with their library card (billed items, etc.) but will come and read a whole stack of GNs while here. Another frustration for me, is keeping up with volume #s of series that are all missing or billed and need to be replaced. I think you are completely right when you say we need to be thinking about having all volumes in a series and working together as a system ("network-wide") to spend our money strategically.

Kristy: I'm glad the post is helpful!

Betsy: Yay! I hope that more libraries can start counting internal statistics -- I can here, but we've never developed a great way to count them every day (too many different folks clean up in the Teen Room.)

I know just what you mean about keeping track of what's been lost or stolen. I've had a number of problems where items have been billed, and I keep hoping the patron will eventually bring them back, but I eventually cave and buy the missing volumes. Then, of course, they finally get returned and I have 2 copies.

I think especially with graphic novels, we need to be thinking in terms of networks -- I've been lucky in my current position to have the funding and support to build a strong collection here, but I know how rare that is. I am pleased to see our collection going out to other libraries, although I hope too the success of our collections encourage them to build up theirs as well.