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Hennen's American Public Library Ratings Share knowledge, seek
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Hennen’s American Public Library Ratings For 2004 By Thomas J. Hennen Jr. IntroductionHas the economic downturn affected libraries? Will the ratings finally include building size and electronic resources? Did many of the same libraries top the rating scales again? In this, the sixth edition of the HAPLR ratings, I will try to address these and other issues. Many librarians look forward to them; others dread or deride them. The rating numbers are treated more fully on my web site. The economic downturn is mostly affecting the input side of the ledger for now, and that is to be expected. There is a lag between budget cuts and the decline in library usage that we are just beginning to see. Denver has been at the top of the list for several years running, but this year, partly due to budget cuts, it slipped to third place. We can expect more of that if library revenues continue to decline. I have still not incorporated the available electronic resources data into the ratings themselves, but I have indicated a separate ranking for the top 5 libraries in each population category in this article and will include more detail on my web site. The data are still too skewed to incorporate into the HAPLR general ratings. Building statistics are finally available. That will be great news for building planners. I have not incorporated square feet numbers into the HAPLR ratings. If I ever do, it will undoubtedly be in the form of a litmus test; a library either passes with a threshold square footage or it does not. More likely, the building data will continue to be reported separately. Much more detail on building data will be available on my web site. State ComparisonsThe table below indicates
the relative 2003 and 2004 rankings of each state. The scores weight the
population of library communities so that a high score for a populous community
in a state weighs more heavily than one for a less populous community. There is
usually little movement from one rating year to the next, but a few states
always move in the ratings. Arkansas, Colorado, North Carolina, and South
Carolina advanced by more than two positions. Minnesota, Montana, and Oklahoma
fell by more than three positions.
Table 1. State HAPLR Scores
Building size is a key measure of public library service, but building the data directly into the HAPLR ratings may not be possible in the near term even though FSCS has finally started collecting the data. Over one out of six of libraries still have not reported their building size for FSCS purposes. Four states (Alabama, Idaho, Illinois, and Nevada) have not reported building size for any libraries. Just 27 states reported building size data for 90% or more of their libraries. The data here can be refined more, of course, and this has been needed by building planners for a long time. In my book, Hennen’s Public Library Planner, I had to use just comparisons for Wisconsin in the section on building planning because the federal data were not yet available. Questions on comparative building size are asked again and again during any library building program. Still, the data that are available will prove extremely useful for building planners. Consider the data in Table 2 below. The table considers three measures: 1) square feet per capita, 2) books per square foot, and 3) square feet per Full Time Equivalent staff. A library with a number lower than the one listed for the first quartile is in the bottom 25% while one above the number listed for the third quartile is in the top 25%. As population size declines, all three measures increase; the trend is less marked for books per square foot. The smaller the library, the higher the space provided. There are economies of scale in larger operations, of course. Note that the libraries in Table 2 are divided into just three population categories rather than the usual 10 for purposes of building comparisons. This is done for convenience in summarizing the data for publication here. Further detail, including regional variations, will be presented on my web site. Table 2. Building Size Comparison by Quartile.
Electronic Resource UseThe Federal State Cooperative Service (FSCS) has begun reporting electronic resource use and spending because enough libraries have begun reporting the data to their respective states. I have still not incorporated the data into the HAPLR ratings, however, for a number of reasons. This is because there is an extremely large gap between the highest and lowest reported rates of electronic resource use. I believe that as libraries get more used to reporting these data, see how they are reported elsewhere, and pay careful attention to the definitions given them by their state library agencies, that these data will improve in consistency and reliability. Until then I am not comfortable including such volatile data in the ratings. The top 5 libraries in electronic resource use for each population category are reported in Table 5. It should be noted that electronic resource use exceeds or is very close to exceeding reference use in all sizes of libraries, as Table 3 demonstrates. In recent years reported reference use has been declining as electronic resource use has soared. It should also be noted, as Table 4 demonstrates, that spending per use on electronic resources costs more than spending per use on print materials.
Table 3. Reference Use and Electronic Resource Use
Table 4. Print Material and Electronic Resource Material Spending Rates
Table 5. Electronic Resource Use
Table 4. HAPLR Ratings for 2004
Table 4. HAPLR Ratings for 2004 (continued)
ConclusionIn closing, I would like to quote something I said in the introduction to my book that Neal-Schuman published this past spring, Hennen’s Public Library Planner:
For many years in the library community there was something of a civil war over planning and library assessment. On one side were those who wanted to "give the public what it wants," and pump up circulation numbers. On the other side stood those who wanted to maintain input standards and then let the librarians choose materials tastefully, regardless of the circulation numbers. This civil war ended in an armistice rather than a victory for either side. ALA opted for a "Planning Process" that let library planners choose the type of library services they wanted for the community regardless of input standards (or indeed, it seemed, output measures). Individual states were left with the task of setting standards when ALA abandoned the task. ALA pursued planning processes and output measures while the states dealt with inputs. In my HAPLR ratings, I have tried to re-unite the input and output threads. I believe that both are important AND that a library must tailor its services to the community served. We need thoughtful planning at the local level in reasonably sized units (wider may be wiser). We must measure outputs and be willing to compare them to one another. We must also specify minimum standards for libraries. Otherwise a collection of cast off books and National Geographic magazines can be called a library and demean the very name “library” for all adequate and excellent libraries everywhere.
Sidebar: Structure of the HAPLR Rating ScoresThis sixth edition of the HAPLR library ratings is based on data filed by libraries that was filed in 2003 about 2002 activities. The first edition in 1999 was based on data filed in 1997. The Federal State Cooperative System compiles the annual reports as reported by state library agencies for nearly 9,000 libraries into a single dataset. The HAPLR Rating Scores are based on six input and nine output measures. Each factor is weighted and then scored. Only libraries serving comparably sized populations are compared with one another. The author adds the scores for each library within a population category to develop a weighted score in each population category. A 95th percentile score for all 15 measures would give the library a score at the top of its population category and a score of 950. A 5th percentile score for all measures would put the library at the bottom with a score of 50. Most scores are between 250 and 750. Further detail on the rating methods is available on the author’s web site. Scores for the top ten libraries in each population categories are included in Table 4. Hennen is Director of the Waukesha County Federated Library System. His book Hennen’s Public Library Planner was published by Neal Schuman in May of 2004. Further information on the comparisons provided in this article is available on the author’s web site at: http://www.haplr-index.com
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