In my Library Life, nothing makes my heart swell quite like a busy library. I came to work late the other morning and had a really difficult time finding a parking space. It was glorious! Inside, we had families playing and reading in the Youth Services Department, tutors and students in our study rooms, a civic group meeting in the meeting room, and our regulars for Coffee & Coloring in the makerspace.
Our door count numbers show that what has felt like an uptick in Library use and traffic has, indeed, been an uptick. In February, we had 4,206 visitors in the building. That averages to about 180 people through our doors each day. For context, we averaged about 140 people every day in January.
We answered more questions in February, by over 1,000 questions! We answered 6,297 questions in February and only 5,159 in January. (When we first started keeping track of the number of questions we answered each month, we were giddy when we answered more than 2,000 in a month!)
Another astounding number for our February statistics is how many times patrons used our study rooms and meeting rooms – 398 times! Seven of those uses were in our meeting rooms and 391 were in our study rooms. When we were planning the Library’s additions, we knew the study rooms would be popular, but we had no idea how popular!
Attendance at our programs and activities was up in February, too. We had 17 programs/activities total in January and in February, but in January, we had 157 people attending the programs compared to the 249 people attending in February.
All of this is to say, we’re getting busier at your Pryor Library and we absolutely love it. Thank you for using your library!