Well, the cops were ready for her, as I was told later. She drove up to the building where their HQ was and double parked in front of it. She stormed in and demanded her driver's license, at which point the cops asked her how she got over here so fast. "I drove!" she said, pointing back at her double parked car. "So I'm going to have to write you up for driving without a license," the cop replied. She did not take that well.Is that even a true story? It's kind of hard to believe. Obviously different states are different, but when I was a teenager I was pulled over when I wasn't carrying my license on me and the police were able to look me up, they didn't have a problem with it.
In-person visits also are up 10 percent compared with a 2006 ALA household survey. Seventy-six percent of Americans visited their local public library in the past year, compared with 65.7 percent two years ago. Online visits to libraries are up even more substantially – with 41 percent of library card holders visiting their library Web sites in the past year, compared with 23.6 percent in 2006. This finding complements the ALA’s 2008 Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study, which found that public libraries have significantly increased the Internet services available to their communities – including online homework help, downloadable audio and video, and e-books.Here is ALA's report for this year, though I feel that it focuses on people's feelings about libraries less than actual stats of who is going. This IMLS report is what I would consider hard data. They've been collecting data long enough that they can now offer trend data in addition to just numbers. I've been reading this report all week looking at digital divide numbers, so it's nice that I can toss some of it in here as well. So ....
In FY 2007, total nationwide circulation of public library materials was 2.2 billion, or 7.4 materials circulated per capita; these were slight increases from the 2.1 billion total materials and 7.3 materials per capita that were circulated during FY 2006.So, reference transactions are down which I would expect, most other things are up. Googling nets this Wikipedia article which seems a lot like someone's homework assisgnemnt in addition to not being accurate [i.e. it takes studies about academic libraries and overgeneralizes them to "library use" ugh] though ALA reports on the The National Center for Education Statistics which reported that during a typical week in fiscal 2008, U.S. academic libraries had more than 20.3 million visits (1.5 million more than in fiscal 2006).
• The growth in per capita circulation from FY 2006 to FY 2007 was a continuation of the steady growth that has occurred since FY 2000. Per capita circulation grew from 6.4 materials per person to 7.4 materials per person from FY 2000 to FY 2007, an increase of 16 percent
• Nationwide, 49.9 million library materials were loaned by public libraries to other libraries. There was a 14 percent increase between this figure and the FY 2006 total
• Nationwide, reference transactions in public libraries totaled 292 million, or 1.0 reference transactions per capita (Table 8). This was a small decrease from the 295 million reference transactions that occurred during FY 2006.
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posted by LSK at 5:00 AM on April 16, 2010