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Boston Public Library: High Budget, Low Circ
March 16, 2006 - 12:54pm — Blake
teaperson writes "The Boston Globe reported on its front page Saturday that the Boston Public Library is one of the best-funded in the nation, but ranks 59th out of 77 large libraries in circulation. The finding was from a study commissioned by the Mayor and library board, who are apparently waking up to the fact that nearly a third of residents surveyed would never even use the library.
This should make good fodder for next week's PLA conference - in Boston."
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Comments
one reason for BPL's poor circulation?
Go to the Boston public library's homepage. Try to find the library catalog.
Took you a minute, didn't it?
Great library system, not so great web presence.
(I remember when I was in high school and an extremely heavy BPL user -- my high school was two blocks from the main branch, so they didn't really bother at the time to keep a good collection, and instead just sent us down to the library. The collection was great, but always very very poorly shelf-read (and caveat, this was years ago, so I have no idea what it's like now). At one point they merged the science-fiction and romance paperbacks (which is what I read) into the general adult fiction, which was terrible, because a small but poorly shelf-read collection is browsable, but a large one *isn't*.)
Re:one reason for BPL's poor circulation?
Yes, poor web presence indeed. Why doesn't the library take more effort to improve their web presence. And the kids search is terrible. No, kids are not going to use that, no way in the world. I wouldn't use it either if I was a kid. These are things that the library should pay more attention to.