Economic Hard Times

Economic Hard Times and Public Library Use Revisited
By Mary Jo Lynch

On November 27, 2001, the New York Times carried a story headed "Economists
Make It Official: U.S. Is in Recession". The first paragraph of the story
noted that "The group of economists that tracks business cycles made
official today what has been apparent to laid-off workers and struggling
businesses for months: the longest economic expansion on record gave way
earlier this year to the first recession in a decade.."

The downturn, which began in March 2001, was also apparent to public
librarians who noticed that circulation was increasing, while their budgets
were being cut. Those librarians began calling ALA, asking for evidence of
what Stephen E. James once called "the Librarians' Axiom" that "public
libraries prosper whenever the country is experiencing economic stringency."

According to a 1986 article by James in Public Library Quarterly, the
relationship between library use and economic conditions had been discussed
for over one hundred years. He notes that one of the first references to the
linkage is a statement by William Poole in the 1880 Annual Report of the
Chicago Public Library and mentions a later reference to the same idea in
Bernard Berelson's classic 1949 volume on The Library's Public. James
asserts that there is "ample evidence" from the time of the Great Depression
to substantiate the linkage between business cycles and public library use.
But his own research, a study of economic conditions and library use in
twenty large cities from 1960-1979, did not establish that "the Librarians'
Axiom" is true. According to James "overall the investigation suggests that
when one uses the most rigorous statistical standards no relationship can be
shown between local economic conditions and the use of public libraries."

The article by James was the only literature ALA could suggest to those who
asked questions on this matter. As those questions increased and National
Library Week 2002 approached, the Office for Research and Statistics and the
Public Information Office decided that the time was right for another study.
Given budget constraints and the need to finish the work in early April
2002, we could not do anything as elaborate as James had done. Instead, we
worked with staff at the Library Research Center (LRC) of the University of
Illinois Graduate School of Library & Information Science to design a small
study that would take a contemporary look at an old belief.

Because the LRC manages the Public Library Data Service under contract to
the Public Library Association, the staff at LRC is in touch with the people
responsible for statistics at many public libraries. LRC staff contacted
those people at the twenty-five public libraries in the U.S. serving
populations of 1 million or more and asked them to provide monthly data on
circulation and visits for the last five years. Twenty-three of the
twenty-five agreed to cooperate and sent data. The visits data were not
robust enough for statistical analysis. However, circulation data from
eighteen libraries were exactly what was needed.

Using that data and the standard methodology of time series regression
analysis, LRC found that circulation has increased significantly in all the
months since March 2001, when the National Bureau of Economic Research
pegged the beginning of the latest recession. To do that analysis, LRC first
combined the monthly circulation data from all 18 libraries and computed the
average for each month. Those averages were plotted on a graph for the 48
months between January 1997 and December 2000. A trend line was established
and extrapolated into the 12 months of 2001. Actual averages for 2001 are
well above the trend line as shown on Figure 1.

But additional analysis makes this conclusion ever more impressive.
Statisticians have determined that variation of data values in any time
series is the result of four types of change:

Normal growth or decline over a long period of time
Seasonal variations
..Cyclical movement in the economy
Residual or Random factors
Mathematical formulas have been established to remove the effects of the
first two types of change. LRC applied those formulas to the data and
developed Figure 2, which shows cyclical variation alone (plus possible
random variation). Circulation is 8% above trend in March 2001, the date
when the recession officially began. It stayed well above trends, an average
of 9.1% above, for the rest of the year. Technical details of that analysis
are explained in a report from LRC posted at:
http://www.ala.org/ala/ors/reports/Economichardtimestechnicalreport.pdf.

Does this prove that "the Librarians' Axiom" is true? It certainly seems
true for those 18 libraries in this period of economic stringency. It would
take much more research to establish that those results apply to other
libraries and to other points in time. But the more interesting question is
"Why?" A couple of obvious possibilities come to mind: people who are
unemployed check out books to help themselves qualify for new jobs and
people with less money to spend get books at the library rather than buy
them. To really answer the "Why?" question we need to know a lot more than
is known now about how and why people use public libraries. In any case,
there is some satisfaction in having statistics to document what librarians
have accepted as true for over a century.



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