At a glance
Curating an inclusive collection at the City of Gosnells
Decisions at Gosnells' four libraries once relied on anecdotal evidence. collectionHQ put budgets, catalogue accuracy and promotion on a data footing — and lifted borrows of overlooked items by up to 87%.
Libraries
Population served
Increase in grooming and beauty borrows
The challenge
What the library was up against
Ensuring that library collections meet community needs has always been a priority for the City of Gosnells libraries. The staff found it challenging to obtain meaningful data to guide collection management and development. Decisions often relied on anecdotal evidence or speculation, making it difficult to proactively anticipate and respond to customer needs.
They discovered that overcrowding in their collection contributed to poor turnover rates and hindered accessibility, and that reducing unused and dead items was a priority to assist with increasing circulation.
The solution
What they did
The adoption of collectionHQ's suite of tools has provided transformative support for the team at City of Gosnells in optimising their collections.
Select, Manage and Promote
Utilising the "Select, Manage and Promote" tools intensively along with the dashboard and the performance tools, staff can now assign budgets across branches, manage accuracy and identify popular areas in the collection, as well as monitoring progress of tasks.
Historical usage, put to work
Access to historical collection usage patterns has provided the opportunity to anticipate customer needs, predict future trends, and adjust collections to better serve the community while allocating budgets more effectively.
The results
What changed
Budgets assigned on evidence
The team successfully utilised the select tool to manage and assign budgets to each branch and collection based on data and evidence. The tool has enabled efficient allocation of budget towards acquiring diverse resources aligned with usage history.
An accurate, uncrowded catalogue
The manage tool has been applied to ensure the accuracy of the library catalogue and to maintain optimal levels of relevant items at each branch library. It has also been instrumental in reducing overcrowding, making the collection more accessible and useful to the community.
Overlooked items, borrowed again
Using the placement function within the promote tool to spotlight items that had never been borrowed or had low borrow rates, the libraries observed a 79% success rate for items in the biography catalogue, an 80% increase in borrows from arts and crafts, and an increase of over 87% in grooming and beauty items.
The community at the centre
collectionHQ helped to streamline their collection strategy to put the community at the centre of the decision making process, rather than collecting library resources for the sake of increasing the size of the collection.
“A smaller collection that is attractive, newer and developed based on analysis of customer borrowing trends via collectionHQ will make choosing a good item much easier for our customers. I often liken it to shopping in a boutique versus an op shop (charity). There are treasures in the op shop (charity), but they are harder to find. Our library collection was looking a bit like that.”
Maxine Ahrens
Manager Leisure and Culture, City of Gosnells Libraries
More case studies
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Collection management
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After service closures, a third fewer librarians and a change of LMS, South Gloucestershire used collectionHQ to re-establish a collection management process — and gave dead stock a second life worth 9,017 extra circulations.
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A decade-long collectionHQ customer cut Dead on Arrival stock from 17.5% to 14.1% while lifting DEI representation from 21.9% to 24.9% — by promoting books rather than weeding them.
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Curating an inclusive collection at Oak Park Public Library
Manual tagging showed the diversity of new material but never the whole collection. DEI Analysis gave Oak Park a holistic view across twelve industry-respected DEI topics.
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