Author: Douglas Galbi

public libraries outperformed video rental businesses

From 1985 to 2004, video rentals from U.S. public libraries grew 340%. Over the same period, video rentals from U.S. commercial rental businesses grew 140%. Public libraries’ video rental activity did grow from a smaller base: 70 million videos loaned in 1985 (6% of the number of videos commercial outfits turned in that year), to 300 million videos loaned in 2004 (12% of the number of videos rented commercially). The growth of video lending from public libraries has been amazing, and largely unnoticed.

Pricing is probably a large part of the explanation for this performance differential. The average price for commercially renting a video in 1985 was $2.38. The average price for borrowing a video from a public library in 1987 was $0.39 (30.4% of libraries charged for borrowing video, and those libraries charged an average of $1.29). In 2004, the average price for commercially renting a video was $3.43. The average price for borrowing a video from a library was then approximately zero. Lower price induces greater demand, and free (zero price) is a highly appealing price.

This video example does not depend on some of the factors thought to be producing the death of paid text content. From 1985 to 2004, there wasn’t a proliferation of free video content on the web. I would guess that, overall, commercial video rental stores have a video inventory that most persons would value more highly than the video inventory of a library. Consumer may like free content. But video is quite expensive to consume. Given that the average video takes perhaps an hour and a half to watch, the higher inventory value of commercial video rental firms might have easily outweighed the lower video rental price from libraries. But it didn’t.

Persons seem to have a high time-discount rate in content choices. The benefit of watching a relatively good video comes later than the cost of paying the rental fee. A high discount rate lowers the importance of the former, and raises the importance of the later. So perhaps a significant part of the challenge of making a paid content model work is delivering benefits soon relative to payments.

* * *
The table below summarizes the facts. Subsequent notes describe the sources and estimates.

U.S. Public Libraries and Video Stores
1985 2004 % inc.
total public library circulation 1150 2010 75%
video share of library circulation 6% 15%
video borrowing price from libraries $0.50 0
videos borrowed from libraries 69 302 337%
video rental price from video stores $2.38 $3.43
videos rented from video stores 1100 2592 136%
All counts in millions. Video includes Betamax, VHS, and DVDs.

Update:  A better estimate of video share of U.S. library circulation in 2004 is 2o%.  That video circulation share implies that, from 1985 to 2004, video circulation from public libraries grew 9.2% a year, while video rentals from commercial outlets grew 4.4% per year.

Sources

Public library circulation: For 1985, interpolated from figures for 1983 (Goldhor (1995)) and 1990 (NCES/ALA). The Goldhor figures are given in Galbi (2007a). For 2004, figure from NCES.

Video share of public library circulation: Dewing (1988) presents results from a survey in early 1987 of about 3000 public libraries having video cassette collections. The survey received 841 valid responses. Id. p. 69, Table 6.19, gives average tapes loaned, by size of the community the public library served. The survey did not include data on total library circulation. Using NCES Public Library Statistics for 1987, I calculated average circulation per week for the four community size categories used in reporting the video survey results (less than 20,000; 20,001 to 50,000; 50,001 to 100,000; greater than 100,000). Average videos loaned were 18%, 7.5%, 7.7%, and 7.4% of average library circulation for the four community size categories, respectively. Responses in the smallest community size category may not have been representative of all small libraries in that category. Since the video survey addressed only public libraries having a video collection, the survey doesn’t account for the zero circulation share in libraries that didn’t have a video collection. For a conservative estimate of the growth rate, I estimate the 1985 video circulation share to be 6%. One small additional piece of evidence: In West Virginia about 1984, the Morgantown Public Library reported that video circulation accounted for more than 6% of annual circulation. See Caron (1984). The video share estimate for 2004 is based on the data in Galbi (2007b). While the data could support a higher estimate for the video share in 2004, I’ve used a rather low estimate to generate a conservative estimate of the growth rate.

Videos borrowed from public libraries: Calculated from library circulation and video share.

Video borrowing price from libraries: Dewing (1988) pp. 70-71 provides the data on prices for borrowing videos from libraries in 1987. Most libraries (73%) had a loan period of about a week. I roughly estimate the price in 1985 to be $0.50, and also roughly estimate the price in 2004 to be 0. The later estimate is based on the declining purchase price of videos and personal knowledge of library operations. Elgin (1992), p. 12, recorded that libraries that eliminated charges for borrowing videos experienced increased video borrowing.

Video rentals from video stores: From EMA, A History of Home Video and Video Game Retailing.

Video rental prices: EMA gives the 1985 average price. I calculated the 2004 average price from rental units and total rental revenue (Adams Media Research data).

References

American Library Association [ALA], Public Libraries in the United States Statistical trends, 1990-2003.

Caron, Barbara (Fall 1984), “Video Cassettes in the Public Library,” West Virginia Public Libraries; cited in Elgin (1992) p. 6.

Dewing, Martha, ed. (1988), Home Video in Libraries (Boston, Mass.: Knowledge Industry Publications).

Elgin, Romona R. (1992), Comparison of Book and Video Circulation in Public Libraries, Student Report, Northern Illinois University, Department of Library and Information Studies.

Galbi, Douglas (2007a), Book Circulation Per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856, available at galbithink.org

Galbi, Douglas (2007b), “library users like audiovisuals,” available on purplemotes.net.

Goldhor, Herbert (1985). A Summary and Review of the Indexes of American Public Library Statistics: 1939-1983. Library Research Center Report (Eric Document # ED264879). Urbana, IL, Illinois University.

National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], Public Libraries.

Nairobi, September 23, 1997

He had come from south Sudan
to the Refugee Office in Nairobi.
He was wearing a tattered
formal jacket and dress shoes.
I had on a t-shirt and Reebok runners.
He approached me with, “Where are you from?”
then a smile and a formal “Welcome!”
He asked how blacks are treated in America.
“Could a black man become President?”
We walked and talked for awhile.

A schoolteacher, he taught history,
geography, and English. A Christian,
he had refused to convert to Islam.
He brought two of his children with him.
He said that they gave him much trouble.
He had to wait six weeks for an answer
from Geneva.

When I asked where he was headed,
he asked if I could spare
ten minutes to talk about America.
We sat under a tree.
Then awkward silence.
I asked about his plans.
He said that he wanted to
sell newspapers. This was a good
job, he said, because
the more he worked
the more he would earn.
To get the job he needed a surety –
1200 Kenyan shillings.
Would I help him?

I handed him the money.
Then he said,
“I must go.
I will pray for you,”
and hurried away.

better networked citations

Web citations make connections well. Web citations combine widely varying citation texts with a standard address (URL). The authority for a standard address can remap it and associate other addresses with it. Anyone can create citations and addresses. Freely available search engines find all citations and rank them according to various algorithms. The result is an inclusive, decentralized environment for making relevant connections among digital works.

While scholarly citations typically indicate works with relatively high knowledge value, the traditional scholarly citation apparatus makes connections much less effectively. Consider this bibliography. It’s unlinked, not-marked-up, plain text. Because (standardized) bibliographic control is a very difficult problem, and many different reference formats exists, a reference text string provides a weak mechanisms for searching for works making the same reference. Moreover, tools for ranking the relevance or importance of web documents that include a common reference string probably don’t recognize unlinked references.

Some services analyze citation links. The Science Citation Index is an expensive service that analyzes citations from a closed universe of sources (“3,700 of the world’s leading scholarly science and technical journals covering more than 100 disciplines”). Evidently, that was too narrow of a universe, because “Also available is Science Citation Index Expanded™, which covers more than 5,800 journals.” Google Scholar recognizes citations in papers posted to SSRN, arXiv, and other scholarly paper repositories. But it doesn’t include plain-text citations in blog posts, syllabuses, and bibliographies posted on the web. More significantly, Google Scholar doesn’t provide a mechanism for end-users to create a value-added reference link. Google Scholar adds whatever value it chooses to whatever plain-text references it recognizes.

I could link a book reference to the relevant WorldCat entry. That would provide some additional information about the book, allow others to download conveniently the citation, and show libraries that hold the book near me. But a person who followed the link probably would be more interested in libraries that hold the book near her. Moreover, searching for links to a WorldCat entry doesn’t seem to be helpful for uncovering related work or interested persons: I’ve found no such links in this example and others. In addition, I couldn’t create a link to WorldCat by adding to it a book that is not already in it. WorldCat’s control over book records and addresses significantly limits the attractiveness to new enterprises of building services using these data.

I could link a book reference to the relevant LibraryThing entry. That would provide some additional information about the book, provide multiple source options for purchasing the book, provide recommendations for related books, and links to persons who have recorded that book in their LibraryThing library. The LibraryThing entry includes a space for conversations, but these seem to be casual, unfocused, and sparse. More significantly, LibraryThing focuses on collections of multiple-interest books, not on books as work-specific links. These are somewhat different structures of conversation.

I could link an article citation to the relevant CiteULike entry. The CiteULike entry provides links a link to the article if it’s available online. The entry also provides rich, formated bibliographic information. Why embed such information in my bibliography rather than link to it, when such links provide considerable additional value? Like LibraryThing, CiteULike links persons who have the same article in their libraries. Just as for LibraryThing, this structure is awkward for relating work-defined collections of references.

In the future I might link book references to Open Library entries. Open Library aims to be an open, extensible catalog for all books. It intends to associate with a catalog entry opportunities to buy, borrow, and download the book. Services could easily be written that use Open Library data to export citations in multiple formats. Independently developed search engines could use links to Open Library records, as well as Open Library record contents, to add considerable value to document relevance ranking. Perhaps Open Library will become one catalog to enable effective citation links, not through bibliographic control, but by becoming a popular reference address space.

Citation and catalog software have not given much attention to hypertext citation links. The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records defines user tasks as find, identify, select, and obtain. Why isn’t “link reference” a recognized user task? As far as I can tell, Endnote, a popular tool for managing citations and generating bibliographies, provides no support for embedding hypertext references to independent, value-added, web-based bibliographic entries. Perhaps Zotero, a new citation management tool, will make such links a central aspect of citation management. Better networked scholarly citations would undoubtedly spur faster and broader development of knowledge.