Chair Williams asks about usage data; library directors respond

Okay, I just want to acknowledge that we have been joined by Councilmember Stevens and Councilmember Brewer.

I don't think we covered this, maybe we did in some of the testimonies, but if you could just share how many people use the research collections each year,

and if you have any disaggregated data around residents, students, independent researchers, genealogists, journalists, artists, or academic scholars.

I can speak for the New York Public Library.

We think about visitors as well as users, and so our visitorship is incredibly high across the three research centers.

We received 4.3 million visitors in the last fiscal year, which is a remarkable number.

A small fraction of those are users, and one way that we think about our usership, which can be more challenging to kind of disambiguate, is through our collection use.

We circulated about 440,000 items in the past year across our three research libraries.

And one of the challenges that we have around giving a hard and fast number around what a researcher is, is that we try to be very, very broad in how we define this.

And so, for example, at my building at 42nd Street, many of our users don't actually access the collections.

We just launched this sort of amazing community board in the Rosemaine Reading Room where we ask people what they're doing there today.

And some of our sort of most popular answers are, I'm working on my chemistry homework.

That chemistry, that student does not necessarily have to have a library card.

And so we are always thinking about really creative ways of trying to be able to measure and disambiguate our visitorship, our more tourist-focused visitorship from our usership.

But we also take every opportunity to...

turn a visitor or a tourist into a researcher.

And I can speak for a Center for Brooklyn History.

It's kind of along the lines of what Julie is saying.

So for CBH, we had about 50,000 visitors in FY 2026, with nearly 10,000 using the library for research.

Well, I should say visiting the library.

We tend to not break our visitors down by what they're doing, but we do look at who are accessing our material versus people who are just visiting the space.

A big part of it is that we want our patrons, we want to serve them equally.

We want people who come to our space to eventually feel comfortable using us for research.

So we really do love just being open space.

And it's kind of in line with our ethos for libraries, where we believe that all of our spaces are for everyone.

And this approach kind of just gives people a better sense of comfort in spaces that may feel intimidating otherwise.

And in alignment with my colleagues, QPL, the customer visit, cannot comprehensively be tracked, but we do know that about 50% of the people who do utilize our QPL archive

tend to be researchers, while another 50% tend to be for personal reasoning.