During the recent snowstorms (aka Snowpocalypse), our libraries closed to the public from 3:30pm on a Friday afternoon until 8:00am the next Friday. Almost 7 full days.
Fifteen years ago, that would have meant that very little library research until we reopened. Today it’s bad when you lose a nice place to study but the real show stopper is losing the network. Not only because we deliver a lot of content electronically but because we also use most of that technology to find the paper stuff so carefully arranged within the library’s walls.
Thinking about this, I realized that the unexpected and unannounced closing of our physical libraries for seven days in the midst of a term gave me a nice opportunity to assess digital library usage without the burden of trying to separate out what usage we were seeing from in-library users. Here was an opportunity to see what sort of progress we’re making toward what I assume will be our future–a library where the physical presence of a “place” is far less important.
For a quick apples to apples comparison, I drew together our proxy server statistics for this same period last year and those generated during this year’s snow closing. Since our proxy server handles only off-campus traffic, I could exclude in-library use in both sets of numbers and get a fair comparison with the snowpocalypse stats.
February 5, 2009 – February 12, 2009: 2,692,908 items served (lines in the log)
February 5, 2010 – February 12, 2010: 3,908,821 items served (lines in the log)
Wow. Off-campus use of library e-resources increased 45.15% with the library closed.
It would be easy to read too much into those numbers and there are probably a number of explanations for this surge in pursuit of the intellectual (as an aside, I know at one point I got so bored that I sat through an entire episode of Miss Austen Regrets). Perhaps people just decided to do this term’s reading since they could do little else.
But let’s not lose sight of the fact that thanks to e-content, they could do just that. And who knows, if there hadn’t been so many power failures in the region, I’ll bet this “cabin fever effect” could have been even larger.