For the past few years’ business at PPL has been growing and with the newly renovated main library the trend continues. Attendance and borrowing of collections under the roof at our 4 locations are one source of increased activity but there is also a significant increase in the past year in use of “e-resources” by the general public.
No where is this better illustrated than the statistics for October for TumbleBooks and TumbleReadables which are both available through our website (
http://www.portlandlibrary.com/kidsplace/tumblebooks.htm). Both of these products are designed to develop a love of reading (TumbleBooks) and to encourage early readers (TumbleReadables). TumbleBooks also has a feature to allow you to view the site in French or Spanish thus facilitating native or second language development. October use figures have shown a dramatic increase over October 2009. TumbleBooks use
grew by over four fold from 3,691 views in 2009 to over 16,200 this October, surpassing 10,000 monthly views for the first time. Tumble Readables
use went up 41% (1,299 views versus 919 in October 2009).
It is clear that in the past few months’ that e-books and other non print materials have begun to gain a foothold with our users. Even so, borrowing of books continues to be a strong indicative of the historical situation in libraries whereby all types of formats are used concurrently and often for long periods of time.
The PPL catalog now includes eBooks for downloading. PPL, as it did in the case of the downloadable audio books, assumed a leadership position in providing leadership funds for the both products to then benefit of our users.
