Digital Library Services - 2013/14 Report

The key achievement in the last 12 months was the introduction of a redesigned library website. The new website was launched in early 2014; the goal being an improved user experience for visitors using mobile devices. The site is now fully responsive, with a design that flexibly accommodates the different screen sizes of smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. In conjunction with a new mobile view of the library catalogue access to the library's digital services is greatly improved.

Website Performance

All the key measures of the library website performance have remained fairly steady, improving only slightly. The number of visits (1%), the number of pages viewed (2%) and the number of visitors (7%) have all increased, which is a pleasing result.

Website use is fairly stable, however, all key website metrics are moving in the right direction.

Mobile Traffic to the Website

Traffic from mobile devices continues to increase substantially with mobile phones up 40% and tablets up 83%. This has come at the expense of traffic from laptops/desktops which is down 12%. This confirms the importance of the work done to redesign the library website.

Comparison of mobile traffic. Phone traffic is shown in orange, tablet traffic in green and desktop/laptop traffic in blue

Physical vs Digital Usage

Usage of digital resources has continued to grow substantially. The total use of digital resources has increased by 49% compared with the previous year. As a proportion of total use of library materials, digital use has grown by 2% from 4.05% in 2012/13 to 6.05% in 2013-14, reaching a high of nearly 7% in March.

Digital use has increased by 49% compared with last year

The increase in digital usage has not, however, fully accounted for the drop in physical loans. Overall, usage of all the library's materials and resources has dropped 2% from 1,763,170 to 1,724,690.

Digital use has increased as a proportion of total usage from 4% to 6%. However, the increase in digital use hasn't accounted for the full drop in physical loans

The most popular digital services remain Overdrive audiobooks & ebooks, Freegal music downloads and Zinio digital magazines with these 3 services representing nearly three quarters (72%) of all digital usage.

Proportion of total digital use for different digital resources