It’s that time of year again. End-of-year parties, final award assemblies and the push to send students home with as many books as possible for holiday reading. That means it’s also time to sum up the year in an annual report.
I have to say, creating an annual report is one of my favourite library tasks (after weeding of course). It’s such a powerful way to reflect on the year, see what has made an impact and help direct the goals and actions of the library for the following year. Of course, it’s also powerful data to share with leadership.
I can honestly say I’m surprised that this year was the year we moved into the renovated junior library. That feels like years ago, but was actually January 2025. That’s another reason I like putting together the annual report, it’s a great reflection of the year and a record of the library’s story.
I use a Canva template to create my library annual report. It makes it to easy to make the report visually appealing, with lots of photos to bring life to the year in review and statistics. I love that I now have three, soon to be four, matching reports, due to using a consistent style and format. Creating my report in Canva makes it easy to add data with charts. No dense, hard-to-read report here. I’ve created a blank template now, so each year I just add my data and review, along with photos from the year. It also makes updating the report and comparing the new data to last years’s very easy.
This year, our loan stats are up 28% across the board, with a delicious spike in the Junior non-fiction collection loans, up 85%, thanks no doubt to the non-fiction reinvigoration project, genrefication and new shelving with loads of display space. Other spikes are in our database usage. I had to double check the numbers. Over 2 million views. That’s a lot. A few things were down, like our LibPath views, so that needs some promotion and our fiction loans in the secondary library weren’t as high as I’d like, but makes sense given some of the collection was inaccessible for 6 months due to building damage, so that’s definitely something to promote next year.
Now that I’ve put the report together, I share it with my team. Once it’s been edited, it’s time to share it with the leadership team, school board and school community. That’s always a scary few emails to send, but very important for our ongoing advocacy.
Need some ideas for what to put in your annual report? Check out my suggestions here.suggestions here.
What do you include in your annual report?
Which databases do you use? We found some of ours inflate the usage statistics by counting multiple views for every search when a single search is run across multiple databases. It’s worth investigating exactly what is being counted for each stat recorded. In our library, items accessed / investigated is a more helpful figure than searches, to get an overview of usage.